New Climate and Health Partnership for UNCOVER
We are delighted to be working with the Edinburgh Earth Initiative to develop our work on climate change and health - one of the most urgent and complex challenges of our time.
In this blog, UNCOVER's new Advanced Earth Fellow, Chiara Aquino, and Postgraduate Earth Fellows Sarah Manning and Alys Daniels-Creasey, reflect on our developing focus on the links between climate change and health, and opportunities to develop partnerships across the University and beyond in order to address this existential, global challenge.
What is UNCOVER?
UNCOVER, established by the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is a network of population health researchers and information specialists who respond to requests from policymakers for rapid evidence reviews. The network specialises in delivering robust evidence syntheses with a focus on responding to complex public health threats and using an interdisciplinary approach. Up until now, topics related to the pandemic have held priority, with the network producing COVID-19 evidence reviews related to schools, transmission, race, comorbidities and more.
UNCOVER’s trajectory
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how complex, global health emergencies, such as those linked to the effects of climate change, can only be effectively tackled by bringing together expertise and methodologies from different disciplines and by fostering collaborations between multiple research groups. In response to the increasingly urgent threat that climate change poses to health, UNCOVER seeks to further establish connections across the University’s academic community, providing partnership opportunities to research groups focusing on climate change and offering employability training to students. All backgrounds and experience levels are welcome and encouraged to contribute their interdisciplinary knowledge to enhance this effort.
Partnership with the Edinburgh Earth Initiative (EEI)
Through a new collaboration with Edinburgh Earth Initiative (EEI), UNCOVER aims to develop a pipeline of evidence-based reviews linking climate and health, producing both a wider network of University researchers working in this critical area and a set of resources for ongoing engagement with postgraduate and PhD students. The network will continue to provide capacity building opportunities to those who wish to contribute to tackling complex problems using evidence synthesis approaches. Like UNCOVER’s COVID-19 syntheses, all evidence reviews produced will remain in the public domain.
Upcoming opportunities
UNCOVER’s annual conference will take place online on Tuesday 8 November and Wednesday 9 November 2022, with this year’s theme being "Learning from Covid, Looking to the Future". The first day of the conference will reflect on two years of emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing how the lessons learned during this challenging time can better prepare for future pandemic threats. On its second day, the conference will focus on emergency responses to new health challenges arising from climate change and the progressive loss of biodiversity. You can register here to attend the conference on Zoom:
UNCOVER Annual Conference 2022
If your research sits in the climate change and public health spaces, or if you are a student excited to share your skills and build new ones, please contact the team on usher.uncover@ed.ac.uk for more information about how you can collaborate with UNCOVER.