Billy Tusker Haworth

Dr Billy Tusker Haworth is a Senior Lecturer in Natural Hazards and GIS. Billy is a geographer interested in human-environment interactions, with expertise positioned at the intersection of human geography, critical GIS (geographic information systems), and international disaster studies. Billy's work tries to better-understand experiences of, and adaptation to, environmental change and disruption, including climate change and disasters, and often includes highlighting inequalities, widening research participation, and knowledge exchange beyond academia, involving community, government and non-government stakeholders.

Billy holds a PhD in Geography, Master of Applied Science (Spatial Information Science) and Bachelor of Science (Geography, Geology & Geophysics), all from the University of Sydney. From 2017 to 2022 they were a Lecturer in GIS and International Disaster Management at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester (UK). In 2022, they commenced a research role in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, primarily working on the Marine Resources Initiative project with Geoscience Australia and SE Asian government partners, before transitioning to a lectureship in 2025. They are the lead author of the major report, the 2024 Palawan State of the Marine Environment report, where Palawan is an archipelagic province of the Philippines and global biodiversity hotspot facing various threats.

In addition to their academic work, Billy has worked in industry (GIS), consulting (emergency management), and in the not-for-profit sector (in roles supporting asylum seekers, disability inclusion, and people with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) in disaster risk reduction and humanitarian response). Since 2022, they have been a member of a global consultative panel of experts advising the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction on gender, inclusion and disasters.