Prof Dewald van Niekerk is Head of the African Centre for Disaster Studies at North-West University. He has Authored and Co-Authored over 100 publications which include peer-reviewed articles, books and chapters in books and international and national research reports.
Prof Van Niekerk has been Project Leader for local, national as well as international disaster risk reduction projects, and has undertaken disaster risk reduction research and consultancy in and with the majority of African countries, the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, the UK, Australia, and India.
He has been successful in attracting and obtaining multi-year research and project grants from national as well as international donors such as USAID, Save the Children, Age UK, the World Bank, the German Government through GIZ, the Fiscal and Financial Commission of South Africa and the National Disaster Management Centre of South Africa.
Prof Van Niekerk is the Programme Manager for the MSc and PhD in Environmental Sciences focussing on Disaster Risk Sciences. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies. In 2012 he played a significant role in the establishment of the Southern Africa Society for Disaster Reduction.
His research is motivated by a desire to reduce the possible impacts of natural hazards and unknowns like climate change on communities most at-risk. Prof Van Niekerk's interests include disaster risk governance, resilience building in socio-ecologically linked and complex systems, community-based disaster risk management, disaster risk assessment, building institutional capacities for disaster risk reduction, and transdisciplinary disaster risk reduction.
