DATE / TIME:

2019•11•26    10:00 - 11:00

Location:

Guimarães

Abstract

Adaptation gaps are shortcomings of a system responding to climate change, whereas adaptation deficits are shortcomings in providing services. These two drivers for adaptation are often in conflict in many secondary cities in the global south (SCGS). It is possible to align these seemingly conflicting drivers into a productive unity, a conceptual alignment, which is the first step in achieving harmony while implementing adaptation actions. Hence there is a need to focus on the practical aspects of implementing aligned adaptation action that leads to improvements in liveability, sustainability, and resilience of SCGS. At an abstract level, the nature of the adaptation problem is similar to the complex problems identified in various domains, such as software development, manufacturing, and supply chain management. The widely accepted agile principles —used in the above domains—is the basis for developing a set of twelve principles for urban adaptation, which are synthesized from numerous recent studies that have implicitly proposed or applied most of these principles to climate change adaptation in urban settings. These principles lead to four essential objectives appertaining to the process of sustainable urban adaptation. The urban agile principles were used to analyze the current state of adaptation of Can Tho City in Vietnam and to ascertain the agile ways of addressing its adaptation challenges. Analysis of the outcomes showed that harmonized approaches can simultaneously address both adaptation deficits and gaps.

Speaker

Dr. Mohanasundar Radhakrishnan hails from an agrarian society in Tamil Nadu, India. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from University of Madras in 2002 and MSc. degree in Municipal Water and Infrastructure from IHE Delft in 2009. He worked as a design engineer and was involved in the hydraulic design of drinking water distribution networks and bulk water transmission main in various water supply schemes in India from June 2002 to Oct 2007. After his masters from IHE Delft he worked with Arghyam, an NGO as a Project officer in an integrated urban water management project in Karnataka, India till 2010. He worked as Project Advisor for German International cooperation (GIZ) and contributed towards the preparation of City sanitation Plans and planning of a waste to energy project in Nashik, India. He is a registered volunteer with Mediciens Sans Frontier (MSF) and served as a Water and sanitation specialist in Loas towards improving the water, sanitation and waste disposal facilities of five hospitals in rural areas between Dec 2012 and May 2013. He obtained his PhD from IHE-Delft and TU Delft on the climate adaptation of urban areas towards increasing their flood resilience. He is now associated with IHE Delft’s Flood resilience chair group of Water Science and Engineering Department as a post doctoral researcher. He is one of the volunteers registered with Dutch Surge Support, an program of The Netherlands government which supports international humanitarian agencies who are in need of water and saniatation expert. He served with Red Cross in North Korea as a water and habitation expert in 2019.