The topic of health, both mental and physical, is taking an increasing amount of space in climate change discussions and negotiations. According to the World Health Organization, climate-related health damages are estimated to cost up to USD 4 billion by 2030, with outsize impacts on developing nations. To this end, the recent 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) saw the launch of the climate conference’s first-ever Health Day, with various events that dove into the myriad...
Our resident mental health expert, Sanae Okamoto, was recently interviewed by the UN Regional Information Centre (UNRIC) in Brussels about her research – below follows an except of the Q&A that was published on the UNRIC website on 5 December 2023. Can you elaborate on some specific examples of the impact of climate change on mental health? New terms have emerged to describe climate change impacts on mental health. Climate change anxiety is associated with the symptoms of generalised a...
Four UNU-MERIT researchers (Sanae Okamoto, Shyama Ramani, Rasmus Lema and Alejandro Álvarez-Vanegas) have co-authored articles for a COP 28 bookazine from the global affairs media network Diplomatic Courier, entitled COP 28: Saving Gaia to Save Ourselves. This special edition, which was published on 21 November 2023, focused on three main questions: – How do we craft better collaborative learning ecosystems to better equip youth and adults to address the climate crisis? R...
From 30 Nov to 12 Dec, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Expectations are high for the year’s climate negotiations, which will focus on combatting temperature rise and the conclusion of the first global stocktake, which crucially assesses progress on the Paris Agreement goals. UNU-MERIT will be contributing to the discussions by taking part in the following side events and sessions: All times below are in Gulf Standard...
Below is an excerpt from the article ‘Libya flood reveals disaster prevention deficit in fragile states’, published on 13 October 2023 in Context [a media platform of the Thomson Reuters Foundation] and written by United Nations University (UNU) researchers Michael Hagenlocher, Sanae Okamoto (UNU-MERIT) and Nidhi Nagabhatla, who together coordinate the UNU Climate Resilience Initiative. Research and planning can help minimise threats to infrastructure and people from extreme weather ...
A guest post by Veerle Joosen, recent graduate of the Sustainability Science, Policy & Society (SSPS) master’s degree at Maastricht University, whose thesis was supervised by Sonja Fransen, lead researcher of UNU-MERIT’s Comprehensive Innovation Team on Migration. Throughout my teenage years, my passion for sustainability-related issues has driven me to advocate for the well-being of our planet for future generations. In this blog, I outline the motivations behind the research in my ma...
A guest post by Francisco Mango, alumnus of last year’s 2021-22 MPP cohort Research indicates that subnational actors may play a key role in the fight against the climate crisis Climate change is perhaps the most critical threat to human development. Despite this, multilateral agreements on carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – the most likely explanation of climate change – have led to frustrating outcomes. The repeated failures of governments to ful...
A post by Alex Hunns, social protection researcher at UNU-MERIT New UNU research explores the extent to which climate crises affect 20 of the world’s largest refugee settlements Encampment has defined refugee policy since the Second World War, and refugees fleeing conflict and persecution in their homelands are usually clustered into camps. These camps define a separation or segregation from host populations: physically, camps are located in isolated areas on low-quality land (often with moveme...
Meet the new UNU-MERIT board member Behnam Taebi As a child, Behnam Taebi was interested in nothing more than understanding how everything works, making his education and training as a material science engineer an obvious professional choice. Now, however, Taebi works as a leading ethicist and philosopher in the fields of climate change and energy, developing ethical frameworks from which to address the trials and tribulations of our times. From serving as a researcher and professor at De...
A Q&A with IPCC coordinating lead author Maarten van Aalst About one month ago, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a 37-page summary of its starkest findings on the state of our planet: the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report. In short, it states that we are not only off-track from limiting global warming to a degree that will keep the world inhabitable as we know it, but we are also set to exceed this limit much sooner than expected. Given the complexity of how ...