Erich Meira Wolff

I’m currently a PhD student at Monash University in Australia. My work delves into the challenge of infrastructure provision and risk management in the context of climate change. In my research, I seek to expand the concepts of risk analysis and resilience to interrogate the role of communities in conceptualising and managing floods and other environmental hazards. My current research investigates local perceptions and memories of floods and interrogate how communities can actively contribute to more nuanced and democratic decision-making in the realm of infrastructure design and planning. Having worked with risk analysis over the last seven years, my thesis investigates community-based methods for mapping floods in the context of informal settlements in the Global South. This work is based on a two-year flood monitoring project conducted alongside communities living in Indonesia and Fiji. This project collected more than 5000 photos between 2018 and 2020 that were used to inform the design of nature-based infrastructure systems in flood-prone areas. My research on floods and flood perceptions is based on qualitative and quantitative methods including interviews, field observations, digital mapping and statistical analysis of flood-level data.

Recent Publications

  1. WOLFF, E. 2021. ‘Investigating the Promise of a “People-Centred” Approach to Floods in the Context of the Sendai Framework: Types of Participation in the Global Literature of Citizen Science and Community-Based Flood Risk Reduction’. Progress in Disaster Science, April, 100171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2021.100171
  2. RAMIREZ-LOVERING, D., PRESCOTT, M., JOSEY, B., MESGAR, M., SPASOJEVIC, D., WOLFF, E., Operationalising research-embedded PhDs in transdisciplinary, action research projects, Chapter in Edited Book “The PhD at the End of the World: Provocations for the doctorate and a future contested”, BARNACLE, R., CUTHBERT, D. (eds).
  3. WOLFF, E. Uncharted Terrain: the Clash between Risk Management and Informal Urbanisation. The Urban Transcripts Journal, ISSN 2514-5339. Article in Peer Reviewed open-access journal.