School of Geography and the Environment

Download Alex Guerra Noriega's CV

The mountain research community has identified the need to better understand extreme events, hazards, and risk (including their mapping) in mountain areas. These become significantly more relevant in light of climate change, especially because mountain regions may experience the impacts more strongly than others. Globalisation could also be playing an important role in shaping disaster risk either as a major cause of environmental change and increasing vulnerability to it. The highlands of Central America, known as highly vulnerable to natural hazards, present an opportunity to study these issues. Framed in political ecology and several approaches to hazard theory in geography, this research aims to examine how risk of weather-related disasters is changing in mountain areas of Guatemala. The underlying (multiple) hypothesis is that risk is increasing because there are more extreme rainfall events, changes in land use/cover are allowing more hazards to occur and because human exposure to them is becoming greater.

The work involves four related activities:

1. An analysis of extreme rainfall events and their trends based on rainfall records;
2. A comparative analysis of land cover/use and extreme rainfall events in causing landslides;
3. A study of how and why human settlements are expanding and whether this is the main social cause of increasing exposure to hazards. These last two activities will be based on remote sensing and GIS as well as physical and socio-economic data collected in the field.
4. An integrating assessment of how the different factors are shaping risk and what implications they have for a future in which climate, land use and population are likely to continue to change.

Academic background

• D.Phil. in Geography (candidate) Oxford University Centre for the Environment
  Oct 2006 – Sep 2009. Awarded Clarendon Fund scholarship and UK Government Overseas Research Students scholarship
• MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management, Oxford University Centre for the Environment
  Oct 2005 – Sep 2006. Awarded International Fellowship Programme scholarship by the Ford Foundation.
• Honours, Licenciatura en Ingeniería Forestal (5 years plus thesis), Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG)
  Jan 1999 – June 2004. Awarded scholarship by UVG.
• BSc in Forestry, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala
  Jan 1999 – Nov 2003.

Work Experience

Fundación Defensores de la Naturaleza (environmental NGO in Guatemala)

Coordinator of a water management project in one of the 20 main river basins in the Sierra de las Minas Biosphere Reserve (July 2004-July 2005).

Del Valle University, Guatemala

GIS laboratory assistant for the Izabal Lake land use map project (March and April 2004). Biology laboratory and class assistant (Jan-Nov 2002).

Publications

• Guerra A and D Liverman (forthcoming) Keeping the risk by diverting the blame? Human dimensions of Hurricane Stan in Atitlan, Guatemala. Submitted on 6/06/2007 to The Professional Geographer Journal.
• Guerra A (2006) Hurricane Stan in the Lake Atitlán Basin, Guatemala: a political ecology study. Master’s dissertation. University of Oxford.
• Guerra A & S Alvarado (2006) From the Sierra de las Minas to the San Jeronimo valley: local actions for integrated water management. Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza: Turrialba.
• Guerra A (2004) Economic valuation of the contribution of forests to water quality regulation for hydroelectric generation and irrigation in the Pasabién River, Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala. Undergraduate thesis. Del Valle University. Guatemala City.

Languages: Spanish (native speaker), English (fluent), Italian and Norwegian (fair).