N8 Climate and Health Community Building Award

Five community building grants have been awarded under the N8 Research Partnership’s Collabor8 Fund, with the theme ‘The Road to 2050’. The fund aims to support new and emerging groups of researchers with the vision and enthusiasm to work together across the N8 Research Partnership. N8 says that from transport to climate health, our communities will work across the N8 universities to drive towards Net Zero. 

N8 Climate and Health

One of the five funded communities is N8 Climate and Health, led by Lea Berrang Ford and Helen Rajabi from the University of Leeds, in collaboration with colleagues at Liverpool and YESI’s Matthew Thomas, Lindsay Stringer, and YESI Environment & Health Research Theme Leads Pete Coventry and Piran White. The N8 Climate and Health group proposes to develop solutions that will help protect human life from the direct threat of the climate crisis.

The community will address key challenges at the intersection of climate and health, including Ecosystem Resilience (e.g. emergence of new vector-borne diseases), and Physical and Mental Health. With a keen understanding that the climate crisis will have the most impact in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), and often on those populations who contribute the least to global emissions, the community will focus on developing equitable research projects with partners in the Global South, particularly in Africa where existing links such as the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) can be leveraged to drive activity. The funding will enable a sandpit in Autumn 2022 which will bring together different stakeholders including early-career researchers from across the N8, industry, and research funders to evaluate and identify areas for collaboration in climate and health, develop a common research agenda and build a trusted community from which research projects can emerge.