Vijai Joseph

PhD Student

Telephone: +61 2 6268 8317
Fax: +61 2 6268 8017
Email: v.joseph@student.adfa.edu.au
Location: PEMS Nth, Room 303

Field of Study - Geography

Supervisor: Dr Alec Thornton

Co-Supervisor: Prof Brian Lees, Dr David Paull, Assoc. Prof. Stuart Pearson

Research Topic - Sea level rise and human vulnerability: Developing a systems approach and perspective

Across the globe, the water level of the sea was on the rise last century. This research aims at assessing the vulnerability of different occupational groups such as traditional fishermen, brackish pond farmers and industrial labourers to the phenomenon of sea level rise, taking tidal floods as a proxy for the impending hazard. This research tries to holistically analyze the Livelihood-Environment Systems of these occupational groups and the mutual interplay between factors in this system that influence the vulnerability of the people to sea level rise through a System Dynamics approach. The comprehensive understanding of the nature of the Livelihood-Environment Systems of these groups will be helpful to model the system behaviour determining the vulnerability status of these groups in different socio-economic scenarios. This kind of comprehensive understanding of the Livelihood-Environment Systems and the interplay of the influential factors will help planners to plug holes in the system in order to adopt an efficient adaptive capacity improvement mechanism for the people to combat disasters like sea level rise. The whole exercise is contextualized on the coastal inundation model developed for different sea level rise scenarios using Geo-information tools and integration of this model with the System Dynamics model, which depicts vulnerability, is also part of the research aims.