Rate My Professor Akhilesh Surjan

Associate Professor Akhilesh Surjan is the Research and Theme Leader in Humanitarian Response and Disaster Management Studies in the Faculty of Health, Health Science at Charles Darwin University. He has been proactively engaged with issues of disaster-environment-climate risk reduction, global change, and sustainability in the context of human settlements for two decades. Trained as an architect and planner, Surjan has worked in academic institutions, civil society, and government organizations across the Asia-Pacific region. He spent ten years in Japan, contributing to postgraduate teaching and research at the United Nations University (Tokyo) and Kyoto University, as well as capacity building and stakeholder collaboration. Earlier, he deliberated risk management issues at the Disaster Management Institute, Bhopal (India), established following the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, and under the UNDP’s Disaster Risk Management Program, he facilitated the mainstreaming of community-based disaster preparedness concepts into the Indian Government’s policy, planning, and implementation.

Surjan served as a Lead Author for the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and as a Contributing Author for the United Nations’ Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction. He holds prominent editorial positions, including Associate Editor of Progress in Disaster Science (Elsevier, since mid-2019, managing 73 manuscripts), Series Editor of Disaster Resilience and Green Growth (Springer, 2020–2024, 11 books published), Academic Editor of PLOS Climate, and former Editor of Sustainability Science (Springer, 2013–2019). His scholarly contributions include key publications such as “Understanding the impacts of floods on learning quality, school facilities, and educational recovery in Indonesia” (Disasters, 2023, with J. Lassa and M. Petal), “Assessing the real costs of natural hazard-induced disasters: A case study from Australia’s Northern Territory” (Natural Hazards, 2021, with K. K. Sangha et al.), “Integrated Climate Action Planning (ICLAP) in Asia-Pacific Cities” (Atmosphere, 2022), and co-editing Urban Disasters and Resilience in Asia (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2016). Additionally, he chairs a committee for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (since October 2020) and serves on the program committee of the Australian and New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference. Surjan regularly delivers invited lectures at global, regional, and national forums and supervises postgraduate research students in disaster management.