Our teams are working with faculty and centers across Harvard University and elsewhere to examine and prepare-for the impact of the changing climate on human health. As a recipient of Harvard’s inaugural Climate Cluster grant awarded by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, our research is focussed on adaptation interventions aimed at supporting climate-driven migration in South Asia.
Dr. Balsari direct’s Harvard’s Climate and Human Health Fellowship, which is anchored at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, C-Change, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights.
Projects & Initiatives
Climate and Human Health Fellowship
The intensive two-year program includes a master’s degree in public health or public policy at Harvard University; internships at external organizations and agencies; opportunities to learn and engage in advocacy; and training to lead independent research at the intersection of climate change, human health and policy.
Mentorship is provided by an interdisciplinary team of faculty from across Harvard.
Building Data Infrastructure to Understand Climate Change Migration
More than 700 million people in South Asia have been affected by at least one climate-related disaster in the last decade. However, there is only a vague understanding of how climate change affects displacement; how such distress migration in South Asia affects host communities; and the impact that fluxes in large populations have on access to food, shelter, jobs, and population health. The aim of this project is to develop a transformative, open-access climate and population health data-monitoring ecosystem in South Asia to support the curation and application of such data.
Understanding these forces requires micro-data on individual mobility, health, and related measures. Funding will allow the researchers to develop an open-source data repository of traditional and novel data streams from public and private datasets, and invite interdisciplinary teams of stakeholders to explore and apply the datasets to advance adaptation measures. This project is supported by the Climate Change Solutions Fund at Harvard.
Climate Adaptation in South Asia
This interdisciplinary project at Harvard seeks to advance climate adaptation research and implementation at the household, community, state and federal levels in South Asia, particularly in the context of climate-driven migration. By working with our partners in region, including BRAC, BRAC University, SEWA, the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute and several others, the Cluster will identify key community priorities in climate adaptation research, and co-develop technical, legal, policy, financial and educational interventions to test at scale.
Team leads: Professors Caroline Buckee, Peter Huyber, Tarun Khanna, Jennifer Leaning, Dan Schrag, and Satchit Balsari.
