Bengaluru, Oct 22: Commercial property insurer FM and the Indian Institute of Science today announced a new research collaboration aimed at improving the understanding and modelling of natural hazards, climate-related risks and resilience in India.
The organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding at IISc in Bengaluru, creating a framework for joint research on natural hazards, climate impacts and the data and models needed to better understand complex risks. The collaboration brings together IISc’s academic and scientific expertise with FM’s research, engineering and modelling capabilities.
“India presents complex challenges for understanding natural hazards and climate risk, and those challenges demand strong science and collaboration,” said Srini Krishnamurthy, Senior Vice President, FM India Operations. “By combining IISc’s deep scientific knowledge with FM’s engineering, research and risk expertise, we can help improve how these hazards are understood and support better-informed decisions about resilience.”
India is already an important focus for FM’s natural hazard research, including regional and local flood studies and work to develop scalable flood hazard assessment using advanced data and modelling techniques.
The collaboration connects IISc’s work on climate change impacts, extreme hydrological events, remote sensing and water resources with FM’s natural hazard, climate risk, engineering and modelling expertise.
Professor Rajarshi Das Bhowmik, IISc, said,
“This partnership will help develop innovative, data-efficient modelling approaches to improve flood risk assessment and support informed decision-making in a changing climate.”
“Flood and climate modelling are good examples of problems where no single dataset or discipline gives you the full answer,” said Julien Oliver, Research Group Manager, APAC Natural Hazards & Climate Research, FM. “You need to understand the physical processes, terrain, climate, observations and uncertainty, and how those pieces interact. Working with IISc gives us an opportunity to explore new methods, improve modelling and build greater confidence in model outputs.”
Professor D. Nagesh Kumar, IISc, added,
“Natural hazards and climate-related risks require research that is both scientifically rigorous and applicable to real-world decision-making. By combining IISc’s expertise in climate, hydrology and civil engineering with FM’s engineering and risk capabilities, this collaboration can support stronger models, better data and more informed approaches to resilience in India.”
The MoU is designed to support multiple research projects over time, with specific scientific questions, methodologies and outputs to be defined through separate project agreements.
