Dr. Mikio Ishiwatari is a senior advisor on disaster management and water resources management at the Japan International Cooperation Agency, and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo. He has been engaged in projects and research work on disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and water issues. He led the formulation of the Japanese assistance policies of climate change adaptation and community-based disaster management.At the World Bank he worked as a senior disaster risk management specialist and published Learning from Megadisaster: Lessons from the Great East Japan Earthquake. He worked in various positions at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, Japan, for 17 years, and was responsible for research and technology development as a senior deputy director for river technology and information. He also worked as an urban development specialist at the Asian Development Bank. He holdsa Ph.D. in international studies and an M.Sc. in urban engineering from The University of Tokyo. Dr. Daisuke Sasaki is an associate professor of the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. He holds a Ph.D. (2015) in international studies and also has expertise in disaster science.He has been continuously conducting research focusing on the factors that might hinder the resolution of regional issues from the perspective of international cooperation both qualitatively and quantitatively, and also engaged in plenty of international collaborative research with several universities in the Asia-Pacific region.Dr. Sasaki has published a number of articles in refereed journals including the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (IJDRR), and he has served as a guest editor for several special issues of the Journal of Disaster Research (JDR).
