Interview with Nick Baumgart

You are doing a PhD within a project that explores climate change through so-called attribution studies and you will focus on vulnerabilities. How do you see the connection to Global Health?

Climate attribution is a relatively young field, and studies essentially answer the question: How much more (or less) likely has a particular extreme event—like a heatwave, flood, storm, drought, and so on—become because of climate change? Even more recently, recognition of a second set of questions has emerged: why, how, and who are the people that have been affected? Attribution studies use models to simulate an extreme event in scenarios both with and without human-made climate change to answer the first question. This is done by climate scientists, not by us health professionals and social scientists. We answer the second question: the why and how people have been affected. We generate answers through vulnerability and exposure assessments, where we look at the underlying causes of why an event unfolds the way it does in a population. For example, we examine what role urban planning has played in a flood, who are the people most affected by heatwaves, where they live, how their livelihoods expose them more than others, and how different forms of social, legal, and infrastructural vulnerabilities intersect, and so on. These questions are intrinsically linked to health at a local scale, but also to global health on a broader scale. Locally, heat, droughts, and floods have direct health impacts, including deaths, injuries, and disease outbreaks in the aftermath of events. However, they also have long-lasting indirect impacts. People lose their livelihoods, are displaced, their homes are damaged, infrastructure might break down (reducing access to water, electricity, and health services), crops are damaged, food security is at risk, and so on. All these factors adversely impact health outcomes because they affect the social determinants of health—the underlying factors that influence health. Since extreme events are occurring more frequently and intensely around the world due to climate change, implications for global health are becoming more important as well. That is why we need to understand vulnerability and exposure factors, within specific context, but also become aware of recreational patterns. With climate attribution studies, we can push the field beyond physical sciences toward a more interdisciplinary approach, where extreme events are understood as the interplay between dynamic vulnerabilities and the climate hazard at play. In this way, we can advance climate science and strengthen the link between climate change impacts, vulnerability, and human health on both global and local scales. Kenya is faced with many Climate Change related challenges.

Can you tell us a bit about your local partners and the importance of South-North/North-South collaboration?

Yes, Kenya is facing several climate change-related challenges shaped by a variety of climatological, environmental, and social complexities, including public health issues. Addressing these challenges effectively requires an interdisciplinary team of climate and social scientists that combines both local and global expertise. Historically, international research has been driven and privileged by Global North institutions. As a researcher from this context, I think it would be naive not to reflect on my role in conducting research in Kenya and the pivotal role of our local partners. I’d like to claim that our collaborations move beyond such power dynamics and that we are grounding the project in the expertise, experience, and shared leadership of our Kenyan partners. However, I will have to continuously reflect on my positionality within the project and the way we do our research. Only with a mix of local and global partners and by bridging disciplines will we be able to answer the questions an attribution study seeks to address. Therefore, the principal investigators are from the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) and the University of Copenhagen. The KMD brings in extensive expertise on ongoing climate science in the region, including experiences with attribution studies worldwide and Kenya-specific contexts. As the IPCC Africa focal point, the KMD also ensures that the project reflects the specific realities and scientific needs of the wider region. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and Grantham Institute at Imperial College London complement the climate aspects of the project with expertise in global climate science and attribution methodologies. The University of Nairobi adds critical contributions by providing expertise from a climate and social science perspective. Most importantly, our partners have a nuanced understanding of Kenya’s diverse geographies and complex socio-cultural networks, which is pivotal to our fieldwork. Additionally, we try to bridge research and practice with the support of the Kenya Red Cross. They help facilitate conversations with “vulnerable” communities and co-create solutions through workshops and other participatory methods. In this way, outcomes will inform climate-resilient humanitarian strategies and benefit the communities beyond the academic sphere. Ultimately, this South-North/North-South collaboration is not just about achieving the project’s goals or a one-way street of capacity building, where the “Global North builds capacity in the South.” It is about building research capacity for the next generation of scientists—including me—by developing and strengthening technical expertise and enriching our understanding and approaches to context-relevant climate attribution research in both the Global South and North.

What do you hope to achieve in your PhD journey? How do you see your work having a positive impact on the lives of those involved?

I think the goal of every researcher is to put meaning into their work. For me, that means achievements both inside the academic sphere and beyond the discipline or an academic article. Don’t get me wrong; an academic article can have a big impact, and it is definitely an achievement I am looking forward to in my PhD journey. In the academic sphere, I hope that my PhD can contribute to shaping the field of attribution science in a way that frameworks ultimately consider vulnerabilities and exposure assessments as an integral part of climate attribution studies. This is an ambitious goal and obviously not solely dependent on my research outputs, but it is something that directs my research focus and approach. More concretely, my PhD will focus on case studies of heat-related vulnerabilities in Nairobi and Mombasa. Through this research, I aim to uncover and disentangle the drivers of heat-related vulnerabilities, including socioeconomic, infrastructural, environmental, and political factors. A significant milestone would be contributing to the establishment of heatwave definitions tailored to these local contexts, together with the climate scientists and the communities. Co-creation of knowledge is essential, but it presents a challenge as it is a new approach for me in a research context. I hope it is a skill/approach that I will acquire with the help of my partners and supervisors to produce meaningful research outcomes. Outcomes such as a heatwave definition can form the foundation for promoting policy implementation, specifically heat action plans that are responsive to vulnerabilities in informal settlements and the Kenyan, possibly East African, context. In the end I think my PhD journey will reveal a number of achievements that I cannot foresee, as well as challenges and struggles. I guess that is inevitable as a PhD, or any profession for that matter. For me it is just important that I know what drives me to pursue this PhD and that my considerations reflect in my approaches and the various forms of outcomes.

Nick’s PhD is funded from the Climate Change Attribution and Vulnerability in Kenya” project with funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Denmark. (DFC File No. 23-12-KU).

Nick Baumgart is a Global Health MSc graduate at the Global Health Section at KU.