Research Themes
Climate Change
The Sixth Annual Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) described recent climate change trends as ‘code red for humanity’, which calls for urgent global action. WeCLISH focuses on climate vulnerability assessment and exploring the impacts of climate change to identify relevant mitigation and adaptation policies that are relevant at multi-scalar levels – local, national and global. We use scenarios of climate change to assess the impacts of climate change and integrate the voices of local communities, through knowledge translation, to co-produce policy-relevant alternatives to mitigating and adapting to the changing global climate.
Sustainable Livelihoods
Human-environment interactions have impacts on socio-ecological systems including livelihoods. As such, it is immensely critical, in this era of worsening climate change, to identify sustainable livelihood strategies that reduce food insecurity and malnutrition while ensuring ecological integrity. WeCLISH’s approach of using various strategies and theoretical framings to explore the interlinkages between livelihoods including agriculture and the environment to address current global food insecurity, deforestation, land degradation and low agricultural productivity. Our adoption of the spatio-temporal approach makes it possible to map out solutions that are in line with current trends and challenges to provide relevant policy information.
Health
With the world currently experiencing public health crises due to pandemics and many parts of the world experiencing a double burden of disease, while climate change and livelihoods strategies exacerbate environmental and human health issues, it is timely to have a deeper appreciation of the linkages between humanity’s use of environmental resources and resulting repercussions of this use. WeCLISH’s adopts a transdisciplinary approach that views health multidimensionally from both the biomedical model and the social determinants of health perspective through an international network of scientists, policymakers, civil societies and students, to assess the interlinkages between social and ecological systems to better understand the challenges emanating for socio-ecological systems and identify innovative approaches to addressing such challenges. This One Health approach integrates ideas from the research themes WeCLISH focuses namely climate change and sustainable livelihoods, to ensure optimal health for communities.
