Aaron OpdykeThe University of Sydney · School of Civil Engineering
Aaron Opdyke
PhD
About
43
Publications
13,437
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259
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My research seeks to understand the connections between communities and their infrastructure, making contributions to humanitarian response, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation.
Additional affiliations
August 2013 - August 2017
Education
August 2013 - August 2017
August 2013 - May 2015
September 2009 - June 2013
Publications
Publications (43)
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...
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 (...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The humanitarian shelter sector continues to transition toward more inclusive models of supporting recovery that are led by affected populations. With nearly one-third of the world's urban population is renting, there is a greater awareness required to support tenants, understand their motivations, and assess their needs. Similarly, hosting of disp...
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...
Projects
Projects (5)
Disasters cost the global economy $520 billion (USD) and drive more than 26 million people into poverty each year. Floods continue to impact the largest number of people of any type of disaster globally, having affected more than two billion people over the last decade. The primary objective of this study seeks to unpack how different methods of assessing hazards influence disaster risk assessments.
The overall objective of this project seeks to support local governments in developing urban communities to incorporate climate change into flood risk assessments and mobilise knowledge to realise resilient and sustainable development. As a result of better understanding the influence of climate change on flood risk, local governments and communities can make more informed decisions on their development pathways. Increased access to flood risk assessments that forecast future changes will serve to not only reduce risk, but also prevent the creation of new risk – a growing concern. This knowledge holds potential to save lives and prevent economic losses. The project will also seek to synthesise appropriate and simplified methods that can be used to create best practice on integrating climate change into flood models. Exchange of lessons from across the selected contexts will also create understanding of how risk assessments can be mainstreamed across local government development efforts. Importantly, our approach seeks to interrogate how local governments value, use, and understand climate change models. This complimentary objective seeks to ensure that the intersection of local and scientific knowledge results in policy action for local communities.
This research aims to understand the role of informality in post-conflict and post-disaster sheltering processes and its impact on long-term reconstruction planning efforts. The project seeks to explore household sheltering pathways for informal settler families (ISFs), relocated families in government-financed housing programs, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) hosted by family members with a focus on health, livelihood, education, and social impacts.
