Greg Bankoff is a historical geographer who focuses on the way societies interrelate with their environments over time, especially the way people adapt to frequent hazards. For the last 25 years, he has focused his research primarily on Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Pacific and the North Sea seeking to understand how societies, both past and present, have learnt to normalise risk and the manner in which communities deal with crisis through applied interdisciplinary approach that combines archival analysis with fieldwork, community mapping, interviews and focus groups. He has published extensively including over a 100 refereed journal articles and book chapters. Among his publications are co-authoring The Red Cross’s World Disaster Report 2014: Focusing on Culture and Risk and a companion volume entitled Cultures and Disasters: Understanding Cultural Framings in Disaster Risk Reduction (2015).

Education: BA (Honours) Portsmouth 198; DipEd Murdoch University 1984; Ph.D. Murdoch University 1991

Ongoing projects:

• Arts & Humanities Research Council Local Governance and Community Resilience: How Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs) and Communities Managed Flooding in England (2018-2021) - Principal Investigator.  
• Australian Research Council, Hazards, Tipping Points, Adaptation and Collapse in the Indo-Pacific World (2016-2021) – Co-investigator.
• Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Climate Change and Governance in Indonesia and the Caribbean: A Pilot Program on Marine Protected Areas (2021-2023) – Co-investigator.
• European Research Council Starting Grant, Pantropocene: Finding a Pre-Industrial, Pre-Tropical Anthropocene (2020-2025) - Outside Expert.
• Royal Society Resilient Futures Challenge-Led Grant, Using a Multi-Hazard and Catchment-based Approach to Understand and Increase Resilience in Hyper-expanding Cities in Vietnam and the Philippines (2019-2022) - Outside Expert.

Some recent publications:

• Katie Oven and Greg Bankoff, ‘The Neglected Country(side): Earthquake Risk Perceptions and Disaster Risk Reduction in Post-Soviet Rural Kazakhstan’, Journal of Rural Studies, 80, 2020, pp.171-184.
• Greg Bankoff, ‘Under the Volcano: Mount Mayon and Co-volcanic Societies in the Philippines’, Environment and History, 26, 1, 2020, pp. 7-29.
• Greg Bankoff and Katie Oven, ‘What Happened to the Second World? Earthquakes and Postsocialism in Kazakhstan’, Disasters, 44, 1, 2020, pp. 3-24
• Greg Bankoff and Katie Oven, ‘From Nomadic Communitarianism to Civil Socialism: Searching for the Roots of Civil Society in Rural Kazakhstan’, Journal of Civil Society, 15, 4, 2019, pp. 373-391.
• Greg Bankoff, ‘Remaking the World in Our Own Image: Vulnerability, Resilience and Adaptation as Historical Discourses’, Disasters, 43, 2, 2019, pp. 221-239.
• Greg Bankoff, ‘Blame, Responsibility and Agency: “Disaster Justice” and the State in the Philippines’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1, 3, 2018, pp.363–381.
• Greg Bankoff, ‘Malaria, Water Management and Identity in the English Lowlands’, Environmental History, 23, 3, 2018, pp. 470–494.
• Greg Bankoff, ‘Aeolian Empires: The Influence of Winds and Currents on European Maritime Expansion in the Days of Sail’, Environment and History, 23, 2, 2017, pp.163-196.