UWI Professor Anthony Clayton Recruited for Climate Change Initiative

KINGSTON, Jamaica – University of the West Indies professor and lead expert in foresighting and future-oriented planning, Professor Anthony Clayton, has been recruited to partner with the Inter-Academy Partnership (IAP) on a new initiative to assemble the world’s best solutions for climate change and health policies.

UWI Professor Anthony Clayton, to partner with IAP on climate change policyThe IAP is a global research network that links all of the Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine of the world.

Professor Clayton said he was “honored to have been asked to serve on this program, which is of truly global significance”.

Science has suggested that climate change could seriously disrupt food and water supplies which could result in nearly 200 million refugees over the next two decades as people are driven out of lands that are too hot and arid to support life or are disappearing under the sea as polar ice caps melt.

Scientists and climate watchers also believe that many people may be displaced by the progressive loss of coastal cities and infrastructure to rising seas and increasingly powerful hurricanes.

The IAP, which is a network of over 140 national science academies and 30,000 leading scientists, engineers and health professionals in over 100 countries, will now lead a global program to encourage the multi-sectoral, systems-based studies and policies needed with the goal of embedding these ideas into government thinking and practice.

The IAP has embarked on a search for the world’s best solutions that can sustain human health and welfare under the severe challenges of climate change.

Professor Clayton has been recruited to join the committee that will review the best available solutions, and choose those that are to go forward to the governments of the world.