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The case deals with the Bullwhip phenomena that can be observed in a supply chain.

This case is suitable for all levels of students, undergraduate MBA to Executive MBA classes and practitioners. Assignment questions are designed from the perspective of teaching this case to a business student audience. The case is ideally suited for a supply chain management course and can be introduced to demonstrate the bullwhip effect in an operations management course.

Set in May 2011, the case presents the discussions in the meeting summoned by Mr Srinivas, the director (technical) of Health Pharma (not the name of a real organization) in response to the huge losses faced by the organization in the last financial year. The discussions point to the inability of the organization to appropriately forecast demand across the different echelons and also absence of information transparency, leading to the loss. The catastrophe indicated the need to adopt an ERP solution, which was earlier overlooked by Health Pharma management.

These are an introduction to the concepts of the bullwhip effect and the case presents a managerial solution to the supply chain problem demonstrated.

Teaching notes are available for facilitating the instructor to present and discuss the case in a classroom setting.

Cities and urban areas are increasingly becoming the settlement of choice for a majority of humans.

Many of the global environmental problems that we are now facing have their precedence and causes in the cities and urban areas we live in.

Lessons in understanding urban risk are now emerging – urban hazards and risk are predominantly human-induced, and exacerbate natural events. Various economic, social, and economic aspects compound the risks that urban residents face.

Urban lifestyles and resource consumptions can be directly or indirectly attributed to the many environmental consequences that we are seeing – both within the city, as well as the entire hinterland or urban watershed that it is located in.

Rajib Shaw is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies of Kyoto University, Japan. He worked closely with the local communities, NGOs, governments and international organization, including United Nations, especially in the Asian countries. He is currently the Chair of the United Nations Asia Regional Task Force for Urban Risk Reduction. His research interests are: community-based disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, urban risk management, and disaster and environmental education.

Urban risk is increasing and will increase for next several years. For the first time in the history, the urban population is more than the rural population in the world. The speed of urbanization is highest in Asia, and consequently unplanned development, migration from rural areas and increasing vulnerabilities are the characteristic features of urbanization in Asia. Urbanization is increasingly located in the developing countries: in 1970s, 50% of urban residents lived in developing countries, whereas it is increased to 66% in 1990s, and is projected to be 80% by 2020. The key issue of Asian urbanization is its variation. Each country has its characteristic context and the nature and issues of urbanization is different from the others.

Decision-making is an important step in the risk management process. Decisions often need to be based on incomplete information, and have to carry an element of sound judgment with them. Decision-making is usually a prerogative of government agencies in change of development and disaster management. But it also needs to be included in participatory processes involving citizens – which is far more than mere consent of the public to decisions taken by others.

The most critical components of decision-making are participation and consensus building. In fact these two elements are often in conflict with each other. In the spirit of participation, a wider consultation is needed, and when participation widens, it becomes difficult to arrive at consensus. Simple tools can be very useful in evolving consensus within the planning groups, civil society actors and the government.

The content of this chapter focuses specifically on environmental risk and its potential to exacerbate the negative impacts of a disaster event. It also looks more closely on the built environment and the role that effective decision-making can play in not only mitigating urban risk, but also to preserve/conserve the local environment. They key message of the cyclical interrelationships between good environmental management and reducing disaster risk, lies at the core of this paper.

Urbanization is a complex dynamic process playing out over multiple scales of space and time. It is both a social phenomenon and a physical transformation of landscape that is now clearly at the forefront of defining current and future trends of development. The key challenge for effective urban risk reduction and mitigation will be to identify the points of intersection for urban vulnerability and risk reduction in order to localize and contextualize the components, so that it can be customized to the unique needs of each urban area. This requires a critical revisit to the way we look at cities and urban areas, and is a useful starting point to contextualize the urban risk management components presented earlier. Taken together these points of intersection put cities in a unique position to generate both the problem and the solution. The concentration of politico-economic decision-making processes in cities of Asia, particularly capital mega cities, provide greater opportunities to meet the urban vulnerability challenge. For effective urban risk reduction, there is a need to strike a balance between natural and built environments and between ecological and economic objectives.

On Wednesday October 20, 2004, Typhoon Tokage (called the “Typhoon no. 23 of 2004” in Japan), one of the deadliest storm in years, swept through most of the southern half of Japan. People were overcome by the massive waves and flash floods triggered by the typhoon's heavy rains and strong winds, which left at least 69 people dead, 20 missing, and some 342 injured, out of which 66 were serious injuries. The number of typhoon-related casualties was the highest in over a quarter of a century, and it further destroyed 50 homes, damaged 1,350 residences, and flooded 26,800 others. Typhoon Tokage was the tenth typhoon to make landfall in Japan in 2004. Storms and floods killed over 100 people in Japan that year, resulting in hundreds of millions of yen in damage, highlighting once again the importance of disaster management in both Japan and in East Asia.