Extreme Natural Events: Sustainable Solutions for Developing Countries

Dr. A.S. Unnikrishnan obtained his Doctorate from Universite de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France in 1985. Subsequently, he joined CSIR - National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa, India. He has worked in the Physical Oceanography Division in various capacities including as a Group Leader during 2009-2012 and superannuated as Chief Scientist (2015). He also worked as Consultant at NIO, Goa (2015-2017). His field of interests are: sea level variability (tides, storm surges and long-term changes) along the Indian coast and estuarine studies using observations and modelling. His work includes extreme events such as extreme sea level using analysis of data and modelling. He had a minute contribution to IPCC’s winning of Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007 jointly with Mr. Al Gore.
Dr. Fredolin Tangang is a Professor of Climatology in the Department of Earth Sciences and Environment, Faculty of Science and Technology at the National University of Malaysia, where he also currently serves as Head of Department and has been with the University for 35 years. Prof. Tangang obtained his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, Canada in 1997 where he developed a model to forecast El Niño. In 2011 he was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. From 2008 - 2015 during the AR5 Cycle, Prof. Tangang served as the Vice-Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1. In the IPCC AR6 Cycle, he served as a Review Editor of Chapter 10. Prof. Tangang is also a Scientific Team Member (SAT) of CORDEX, an international programme under the World Meteorological Organization. He leads and coordinates the CORDEX Southeast Asia. Prof. Tangang has completed more than 30 research projects and published more than 100 scientific papers in international journals.
Prof. Raymond Durrheim (Ph.D., Witwatersrand, 1990) holds the South African Research Chair in Exploration, Earthquake and Mining Seismology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is co-director of the Africa Array Research and Capacity-building Programme, was co-leader of the Japanese-South African collaborative project ＂Observational studies in South African mines to mitigate seismic risks＂ (2010-2015), and is a Principal Investigator of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) project ＂Drilling into seismogenic zones of M2.0 - M5.5 earthquakes from deep South African gold mines＂ (DSeis, 2016-present). He is the author or co-author of more than 160 refereed articles published in journals, conference proceedings and books. He was President of the South African Geophysical Association (SAGA) in 1995/96. Prof. Durrheim was awarded SAGA’s highest honour, the Krahmann Memorial Medal, in 2015, and the National Science & Technology Forum - South32 Lifetime Award for 2020/21 ’in recognition of an outstanding contribution to science engineering, technology and innovation’.​