Assistant Professor
Centre for Wildfire Research, Education, Training, and Innovation
Thompson Rivers University
Dr. Mahed Choudhury (he/his) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research broadly focuses on social and human dimensions of environmental risks, hazards, and disasters both in the Global South and North. His current research investigates proactive managed retreat to promote equitable community resilience to floods in Gatineau, Quebec and Halifax, Nova Scotia. As Principal Investigator, he was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2023–2025) for the project titled Looking Back and Moving Forward: Interrogating ‘Resilient Communities' to Floods from an Emic Perspective in Southern Alberta. Other ongoing funded projects include advancing equity and inclusion of wildfire evacuees in Alberta (funded by Alberta Land Institute) and structural determinants of health and climate injustice among youths in Alberta (funded by CIHR). Mahed’s PhD research investigated the role of multilevel learning in reducing disaster risks and building resilience of coastal communities while master’s thesis focused on wetland-community resilience to flash flood hazards in Bangladesh.
His research appears in Ecology & Society, Environmental Hazards, Natural Hazards, Environmental Science and Policy, Natural Hazards Review, and International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters.
Select Publications
- Choudhury, M., & Haque, C.E. (2024). Disaster management policy changes in Bangladesh: Drivers and factors of a shift from reactive to proactive approach. Environmental Policy & Governance 34 (5).
- Choudhury, M., Wu, H., &Shaidullah, A.K.M. (2023). Improving the feedback loop between community- and policy-level learning: Building resilience of coastal communities in Bangladesh. Sustainable Development 32 (2).
- Choudhury, M., Haque, C.E., & Doberstein, B. (2021). Adaptive governance and community resilience to cyclones in coastal Bangladesh: Addressing the problem of fit, social learning, and institutional collaboration. Environmental Science & Policy 124.
- Choudhury, M., Haque, C.E., & Hostetler, G. (2021). Transformative learning and community resilience to cyclones and storm surges: The case of coastal communities in Bangladesh. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 55.
- Choudhury, M., Haque, C.E., Nishat, A., & Byrne, S. (2021). Social learning for building community resilience to cyclones: role of indigenous and local knowledge, power, and institutions in coastal Bangladesh. Ecology & Society 26 (1).
- Choudhury, M., Uddin, M.S., &Haque, C.E. (2019). “Nature brings us extreme events, some people cause us prolonged sufferings”: the role of good governance in building community resilience to natural disasters in Bangladesh. Journal of Environmental Planning & Management 62 (10).
- Choudhury, M., & Haque, C.E. (2016). “We are more scared of the power elites than the floods”: Adaptive capacity and resilience of wetland community to flash flood disasters in Bangladesh. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 19.