Aaron Opdyke

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Verified

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• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at The University of Sydney

The embeddedness of local and indigenous communities in their environments has led them to develop time-tested knowledge and practices to prepare for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the impacts of natural hazards. Collectively, these are referred to as local and indigenous knowledge (LIK) and have gained a niche in disaster risk reduction (...

There is strong evidence of the short-term impact of humanitarian interventions after disasters, however, relatively less is known about what, if any, impact this support has on long-term recovery outcomes in communities. This research examined long-term housing outcomes following assistance provided after the 2010 Merapi eruption in Yogyakarta, In...

Natural hazards inflict significant damage to dwellings in the Philippines where housing is often the most valued asset of households. Residential fragility functions estimate structural damage to mitigate risk but these are challenging to derive when empirical and analytical data are lacking, as is common in rural areas. Too often, conventional fr...

Recovery after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami remains contested with often conflicting infrastructure rebuilding and social processes that have unfolded in reconstruction strategies. Previous research points to the need to understand the integration of social and infrastructure dimensions of recovery to inform better planning processes...

Storm surge poses a significant threat to property, livelihoods, and life for coastal populations. The Philippines is expected to see the highest rise in storm surge exposure of any country over the next century under climate change, requiring robust knowledge of how current risk and evacuation intentions for households intersect. Drawing on a surv...

While the Philippines has made significant strides in proactive disaster risk reduction measures, current planning actions are undertaken primarily based on historical flood risk. There are gaps in understanding how the escalating impacts of climate change will alter flood dynamics. This study examines shifting local flood risk patterns in the Muni...

Pacific islands and atolls face heightened climate risk due to low elevations and limited resources. The question of (unin)habitability in these locations is often simplified to characteristics of hazard exposure, reinforcing assumptions of inevitable mass migration. Here we use a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of habitability, built from loca...

In the coming decades, we can expect the impacts of climate change to result in more intense and frequent hazards. Consequently, the need to reduce the vulnerability of communities is becoming more pressing. In the Philippines, high intensity typhoons capitalise on rapid urbanisation, lack of preparedness, among other factors, to produce devasting...

More than 74% of the Philippines’ population is likely to experience the impacts of multiple natural hazards, highlighting the need to reduce multi-hazard risks. Most multi-hazard interventions, however, are focused on mapping the interplay of risks at a macro level such as municipal or district assessments. There has been less emphasis at the hous...

Purpose This paper aims to introduce an innovative decision-making framework designed to optimize egress location selection in buildings, significantly enhancing safety during emergencies. By integrating social, economic and technical criteria through the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP), this framework effectively manages the uncertainties...

The Philippines experiences frequent flooding, but, despite expansive tools for risk reduction, there remain gaps in understanding generalised relationships between flood events and damage to residential structures for regions outside the nation's capital. This gap has limited the ability to model flood risk and damage without robust functions to l...

The escalating impact of climate change necessitates innovative strategies to enhance public understanding and action. This research delves into the potential of serious games as transformative tools for climate change education and adaptation. Despite their rising popularity, serious games face challenges in effectively conveying complex climate s...

This dataset provides detailed topographical and visual information for coastal communities of the Municipality of Carigara, in the Province of Leyte in the Philippines. The data was collected through an aerial drone survey in July 2022. The package includes an orthomosaic, digital surface model (DSM), and digital terrain model (DTM). This dataset...

Processes of disaster risk creation are outpacing the achievements of disaster risk reduction initiatives. Preventing risk creation is consequently an objective recognised by major disaster frameworks. However, there exists a gap in our understanding of the processes contributing to risk creation, with the existing body of knowledge lacking concept...

While the Philippines has made significant strides in proactive disaster risk reduction measures, current planning actions are undertaken primarily based on historical flood risk. There are gaps in understanding how the escalating impacts of climate change will alter flood dynamics. This study examines shifting local flood risk patterns in the Muni...

Urban coastal communities are among the most vulnerable to flood hazards, with these threats set to increase under climate change. Knowledge of how uncertainty shapes passive or proactive local decision-making processes of climate adaptation remains sparse – with significant potential to inform resilient and sustainable futures. To understand these...

With climate change, disaster, and conflict impacts increasingly intertwining to drive population displacement, there is a pressing need to synthesise the confluence of what we know about this nexus. In this review, we summarise evidence on how these triggers interact-while climate change and disasters can lead to conflict, conflict can also exacer...

While flood risk perception has been studied extensively in general populations, there remains a dearth of focus on youth perspectives – a key demographic to mobilising knowledge to achieve disaster risk reduction targets. This study aimed to evaluate university students’ perceptions of flood risk and their understanding of common flood probabiliti...

This cooperative tabletop game immerses players in the complexities of managing flood risk under climate change. Players collaborate to implement adaptation strategies to protect community assets from flood impacts. Through dynamic gameplay and real-world decision-making scenarios, players must plan for evolving uncertainty and carefully allocate t...

Most disaster-affected populations face the complex task of reconstructing their dwellings with minimal or no external support. However, not much is known about the self-initiated reconstruction pathways of households, especially among Indigenous groups needing to address the competing impacts of multiple hazards. We conducted a case study analysis...

Processes of disaster risk creation are outpacing the achievements of disaster risk reduction initiatives. Preventing risk creation is consequently an objective recognised by major disaster frameworks. However, there exists a gap in our understanding of the processes contributing to risk creation, with the existing body of knowledge lacking concept...

Urban coastal communities of the Global South are among the most vulnerable to flood hazards, with these threats set to increase under climate change. Knowledge of how uncertainty shapes passive or proactive local decision-making processes of climate adaptation remains sparse – with significant potential to inform resilient and sustainable futures....

I am honoured to introduce this volume in a guest editorial for the Journal of Humanitarian Engineering, offering some reflections on where the field of humanitarian engineering might focus its attention given recent events.

The Trumon watershed one of critical watershed in Aceh Province had an increase in historical flood episodes during the past 25 years. This is consistent with the expansion of oil palm plantations within the 53,653 Ha watershed basin dominated by peatlands. According to earlier research, changes in land use in peatland regions may cause subsidence....

Climate change impacts on housing are an essential concern for Alaska Native communities. Adaptation literature has largely ignored the role of inter-organizational coordination networks in supporting housing adaptation. To address this gap, we surveyed 26 organizations and 36 participants from organizations working regionally in rural Alaska on ho...

Landslide risk assessments are increasingly crucial for meeting global disaster risk reduction strategies and mobilising knowledge for local governments to protect communities and infrastructure. These assessments are data intensive, requiring large amounts of spatial demographic and natural hazard information. There are a growing number of high-re...

The damage to the Singkil watershed, one of the largest watersheds in Aceh Province, has become a concern for many parties, primarily due to increased flood events in the downstream area of the watershed. Based on previous studies, the problems which cause flooding are watershed damage due to illegal logging and high rainfall intensity reaching 300...

Effective evacuation strategies in school buildings are critical for ensuring the safety of students and staff during emergencies. Finding appropriate egress locations is an important part of the evacuation planning process. Existing approaches for evacuating schools are based on codified standards without requiring the use of opti-misation or simu...

For communities affected by crises, their experience of recovery is a continuous journey and an ongoing process, but for the diverse actors supporting them, recovery from humanitarian crises can be understood in many ways. Humanitarian agencies, government and donors often have overlapping, but different, perspectives on recovery. These variations...

Global migration and mobility dynamics are expected to shift in the coming decades as a result of climate change. However, the extent to which migration is caused by climate hazards, in contrast or addition to other intervening factors, is a point of debate in literature. In this study, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify and co...

In the past decade, there has been growing pushback towards the idea of migration as a “failure to adapt” to climate change. Climate-related migration is increasingly viewed as an adaptation strategy rather than the consequence of failed in situ adaptation (McLeman and Smit 2006). As we move toward a more nuanced understanding of the interaction be...

Storms globally account for the highest loss of life among weather-related natural hazards. This study examines the relationship between components of housing vulnerability and typhoon related mortality in the Philippines at a municipal level between 2005 and 2015 using a Hurdle Negative Binomial (HNB) model. We find that in municipalities with gre...

Effective evacuation strategies in school buildings are critical for ensuring the safety of students and staff during emergencies. Finding appropriate egress locations is an important part of the evacuation planning process. Existing approaches for evacuating schools are based on codified standards without requiring the use of optimisation or simul...

As the impacts of climate change increase, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change advises that global migration will also increase. A deeper understanding of the factors and interactions that influence the migration decision-making of climate-affected populations is needed to more accurately predict migration estimates and adequately inform...

This research sought to measure social vulnerability at the municipal level across the Philippines. Indicators of social vulnerability were identified from literature and relevant census data was collected from the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA). Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to identify underlying components of social vulnera...

Household perceptions of hazards play an important role in mobilizing efforts for disaster risk reduction. This research aimed to examine perceptions of storm surge in the Philip-pines through a case study of the Municipality of Carigara located in the province of Leyte. Surveys from 1,093 households were collected asking about perceived storm surg...

Storms continue to be the deadliest type of weather-related disasters globally. The Philippines is one of the most at risk countries to disasters, yet there continues to be gaps in understanding where and why people are killed in typhoons – the country's most prominent natural hazard. This research sought to understand how typhoon mortality varies...

Housing is vital in facilitating a return to normality following a disaster; however, it remains one of the most challenging and problematic areas of post-disaster assistance. There is a pressing need to unpack “Build Back Better” aspirations to understand the drivers of safe housing reconstruction. The objective of this research was to understand...

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction recognises housing as an important element of vulnerability, however, there remains limited understanding of how sub-national housing vulnerability varies spatially. This research sought to develop a municipal-level housing vulnerability index for typhoon hazards, applied at a national scale in the P...

Housing is vital in facilitating a return to normality following a disaster; however, it remains one of the most challenging and problematic areas of post-disaster assistance. There is a pressing need to unpack “Build Back Better” aspirations to understand the drivers of safe reconstruction. This research focuses on the influence of technical assis...

CONTEXT Service learning plays an important role in developing globally minded engineers who are more socially engaged. This paper reviews lessons learned from the development and delivery of an undergraduate final year elective in humanitarian engineering, focusing on experiences drawn from working with industry partners and the transition to onli...

Humanitarian shelter assistance increasingly employs build back safer messages as a technical assistance tool to disaster-affected communities. We sought to prioritise the importance of key messages for small, light-weight timber shelter using a combination of Delphi and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods. A panel of twelve academic and pra...

We address the role of shelter and livelihood in humanitarian crises and how stronger livelihoods can support adequate shelter. Their proposed research asks how shelter and livelihood support can be better integrated into humanitarian response, looking at the tools used by humanitarian actors to understand livelihoods, how livelihood security and d...

We focus on ways to facilitate acceptance of local, non-engineered building techniques in post-disaster recovery. Local building practices cover a wide range of local knowledge and practices that are absent from building codes and may be overlooked by institutional actors. The research seeks to analysis social and engineering datasets and assist de...

Earthquake affected households too often insufficiently apply seismic construction knowledge during reconstruction. This study aims to assess to what degree safety guidelines have found their way to practice in Nepal. Differences are explored between communities in the Gorkha and Okhaldhunga districts, which received differing levels of technical a...

Despite expanding infrastructure investments in developing countries, maintenance of constructed infrastructure is not keeping pace and there is a growing need to focus on the long-term operational demands of new assets to reduce vulnerability. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, natural hazards and civil conflicts continue to underm...

Despite the knowledge gained on post-disaster sheltering and housing over the last several decades, there remains a disconnect in the evidence needed by humanitarian practitioners and the learning that the research community is capturing. To determine the research needed by practitioners, we assembled a Delphi panel of experts in humanitarian shelt...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore communication of hazard-resistant construction techniques after disaster in the absence of outside influence. It further aims to unpack the barriers and drivers in the adoption of knowledge processes to identify strategic recommendations to enlarge adoption of safer construction practices by local con...

Urban flooding in developing countries represents a growing threat to sustainable development efforts, yet the tools needed to study these infrastructure systems in data-scarce environments are woefully inadequate. This study seeks to propose a standardized approach and methods for mapping urban drainage systems in developing communities. The resea...

Humanitarian engineering (HumEng in this report) in Australia and New Zealand has rapidly grown in the last five years, with universities now offering courses specifically in the specialisation. Accompanying these new programs are organisations, such as Engineers Without Borders (EWB) and university HumEng societies, which deliver experiential prog...

In the last three years, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney has been trialling the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) in various engineering units of study. The focus of this paper is to present preliminary results of a study that aims to evaluate the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality (IVR) content in supporting stu...

Participation has long been considered important for post-disaster recovery. Establishing what constitutes participation in post-disaster shelter projects, however, has remained elusive, and the links between different types of participation and shelter programme outcomes are not well understood. Furthermore, recent case studies suggest that misgui...

The delivery of post-disaster shelter assistance continues to be fraught with challenges derived from the coordination of resources, involvement of project stakeholders, and training of households and builders. There is a need to better understand what project elements in the delivery of post-disaster shelter projects most influence resilience and...

Participation in post-disaster shelter reconstruction is recognized as an important factor for supporting the sustainability and resiliency of the built environment. Engaging communities in the reconstruction process can help build community capacity and lead to sustained success of recovery projects. However, existing practice often assumes that d...

Sustainable infrastructure that is used and maintained by communities over time, and resilient to hazards, is sorely needed in developing countries where natural disasters cause disproportionate damages and mortality as well as impede development efforts. Shelter is universally recognized as a foundational element of disaster recovery; and while it...

The incorporation of safer building practices into shelter after disasters continues to plague recovery efforts. While limited resources are one potential cause, evidence from case studies suggests that poor adoption of safer construction may stem from a knowledge deficit. Despite these shortcomings, previous research has done little to examine the...

Sustainable infrastructure that is used and maintained by communities over time, and resilient to hazards, is sorely needed in developing countries where natural disasters cause disproportionate damages and mortality as well as impede development efforts. Shelter is universally recognized as a foundational element of disaster recovery; and while it...

Despite significant advances in strengthening post-disaster recovery efforts, misaligned strategy and inefficient resource allocation are far too often the norm for infrastructure reconstruction. To examine the inter-organizational networks that form to coordinate resources for infrastructure reconstruction, we employed social network analysis in 1...

Hazard research has made significant strides over the last several decades, answering critical questions surrounding vulnerability and recovery. Recently, resilience has come to the forefront of scholarly debates and practitioner strategies, yet there remain challenges implementing resilience in practice, the result of a complex web of research tha...

The purpose of our study is to explore the social construction of authority in disaster relief coordination. We emphasize the ways in which stakeholders draw upon various discursive resources in order to establish or preserve their authority to act within a certain problem domain. We review literature on authority, coordination, communication, and...

This report reflects on 19 cases of humanitarian shelter implemented in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Lessons learned, barriers to implementation, and innovative methods are presented across projects in Cebu, Leyte, and Eastern Samar. The report also presents themes in shelter and beyond that defined recovery in communities af...

Large disasters damage or destroy infrastructure that is then reconstructed through programmes that train community members in construction techniques that reduce future risks. Despite the number of post-disaster reconstruction programmes implemented, there is a dearth of research on education and training in post-disaster contexts. To address this...

A diverse set of stakeholders converge to facilitate reconstruction and recovery in post-disaster settings. Shared decision-making, implementation and evaluation are crucial to ensure reconstructed infrastructure delivers a high level of service that reflects local needs and capacities. Despite attempts by organizations to include local knowledge i...

Training in a post-disaster environment offers an opportunity to build resilience within high-risk communities. Education research amasses a field of study that is large in both depth and breath, but there is a considerable lack of focus in post-disaster contexts, specifically the effectiveness of post-disaster training programs. Addressing this ga...

Following a disaster, communities, governments and organizations are required to make rapid decisions that will govern the path towards long-term recovery. Hazard-resistant shelter designs have long been heralded as necessary for facilitating resilient and sustainable reconstruction, however there is sparse documentation of designs implemented. We...

Post-disaster contexts present one of the most challenging functional environments for organizations. The effective allocation of resources and harmonious synchronization of reconstruction activities are considered paramount factors in effective recovery. Coordination has been examined through numerous ideological lenses from scholars, however the...

Effective coordination is essential for post-disaster reconstruction. Presently, however, there are relatively few tools to help organizations manage coordination and communication of post-disaster construction activities. Given the recent increase in use of social media platforms, we examine the use of Twitter following Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolan...

This early concept research outlines the need to better understand reconstruction processes in post-disaster environments that can create resilient and sustainable infrastructure systems and proposes methodology aimed at addressing gaps in theory and practice. The paper first introduces the rationale for studying project outcomes of sustainability...