Special Feature: Realising Disaster-Resilient and Sustainable Societies

ID&E's sustainability strategy has recently evolved to incorporate disaster resilience as a material focus area. This strategic repositioning, catalysed by our integration with Tokio Marine Group, reflects our commitment to comprehensive risk management and long-term value creation. This prompts us to revisit the question: what exactly does the concept of disaster resilience encompass?

Disaster resilience represents a critical capability that transcends traditional disaster prevention and mitigation approaches. Our framework operates on the recognition that complete damage prevention is not feasible, instead prioritising damage minimisation and rapid restoration to original or enhanced operational states. Resilience functions as an essential short-term response capability that must be systematically integrated within our broader sustainability strategy targeting long-term value preservation. Given the increasing frequency of extreme events, proactive engagement across individual, community, and enterprise levels has become a strategic imperative.

Our deployment in response to the Noto Peninsula Earthquake (Japan) demonstrated the critical importance of comprehensive recovery planning. Field observations revealed limited recovery progress and persistent community displacement one-year post-event—a pattern consistent with outcomes from the Great East Japan Earthquake. Traditional disaster response approaches focusing on individual events have proven insufficient. Our analysis indicates the necessity for temporal integration across multiple planning horizons, incorporating "Build Back Better" principles through multi-stakeholder collaboration to achieve effective regional recovery outcomes.

This illustrates the strategic integration requirements between sustainability—which establishes enduring operational conditions—and resilience—which enables rapid restoration to enhanced performance states are inseparable as concepts.

What constitutes ID&E Group's competitive positioning within the disaster response and resilience market?

We were involved in a broad range of operations related to the construction of the Yamba Dam project in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, which we believe truly demonstrated the strength of our integrated capabilities. The project faced numerous challenges, including opposition movements and legal disputes; nevertheless, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism pressed with determination, responding to local calls for its swift completion. After its completion, tourism facilities were developed, contributing to the revitalisation of the region.
One of the key roles of the Yamba Dam was flood control. During the 2019 typhoon season, Yamba Dam prevented downstream flooding by capturing upstream Tone River waters, despite being in trial impoundment. As the on-site trial impoundment manager, I witnessed our planned slope protection measures function perfectly under rapidly rising water levels. The infrastructure's ability to capture massive river water volumes and prevent damage was profoundly impactful from an engineering perspective. While this project was met with a range of perspectives and criticisms, I came to truly appreciate that many lives and properties had been protected. It reaffirmed my belief that the path we had taken was the right one.

Dam construction typically involves incremental increase in water level during trial impoundment phase in the construction, monitoring for leakage or displacement. However, when the typhoon caused rapid water level rises, Yamba Dam's unwavering stability demonstrated our technical excellence. Our involvement in Oda River improvement project (Okayama Prefecture, Japan) exemplifies this urgency—flooding during the planning phase claimed approximately 50 lives that might have been saved through earlier project completion. This experience reinforced our commitment to accelerated recovery and reconstruction programmes, ensuring communities remain protected when similar disasters occur.

Disaster preparedness encompasses a wide range of areas, but among them, landslide countermeasures and sediment control projects represent one of ID&E's longstanding focus areas.

These projects fundamentally address sediment disasters. Slope failures cause devastating regional damage, and without proper countermeasures, disasters repeatedly occur in the same locations, causing continuous harm to communities. We conduct investigations and design countermeasures for such vulnerable areas.

Beyond monitoring dams and subsurface conditions, we must focus on protecting lives and livelihoods whilst developing cost-effective solutions. Such judgements require extensive engineering experience.

Particularly for public works projects, maintaining cost-effectiveness balance is critical. Since these considerations aren't codified in standards or legislation, we prioritise collaborative discussions with clients to determine optimal approaches that balance budget constraints with safety requirements.

The importance of disaster resilience is growing not only domestically but internationally. How do you perceive the current situation?

Whilst ASEAN countries experience economic development, their disaster preparedness remains nascent. Prime Minister Ishiba's ASEAN visit confirmed strengthened disaster prevention cooperation, expanding opportunities to deploy Japanese technology to governments and enterprises across these countries. We feel that instances where we can contribute locally are increasing.

In Japan, disaster resilience is positioned as a national strategy, with policies promoted by the Cabinet Secretariat under the Basic Act for National Resilience. The entire nation, including prefectures and municipalities, works towards resilience enhancement, and ID&E provides technical support aligned with this direction. We also participate in SIP (Strategic Innovation Program), advancing disaster counter-measures utilising cutting-edge technology.

ID&E focuses not only on public sector programmes but also private sector expansion. What value do you provide through group collaboration with Tokio Marine?

Enhancing value provision in disaster prevention for private operators represents a key objective in our collaboration with Tokio Marine. Particularly in "private disaster prevention," we broadly address soft aspects including corporate BCP (Business Continuity Planning) support, evacuation guidance, and risk assessment. Numerous latent needs exist in these fields that haven't yet materialised, and we anticipate certain expansion going forward.

For private enterprises, initial investment and post-disaster recovery timing are crucial. Unlike public works, companies make decisions based on 20-30-year cash flow projections. Whilst insurance covers certain aspects, technical approaches are necessary for uncovered areas. Through collaboration with the Tokio Marine Group, providing total solutions combining insurance and technology represents our strength.

Please share your vision for the value ID&E can provide in the future.

Our distinguishing feature lies in providing comprehensive, one-stop solutions across all processes: prevention, response, assurance, and recovery. Through collaboration with the Tokio Marine Group, we're developing new solutions that integrate insurance and engineering technology. We're also advancing integrated digital infrastructure solutions to address labour shortages, considering delivering new value to society as our mission. Thus, we envision long-term goals that transcend disaster-resilient societies to construct societies that overcome disasters and regenerate better.