Since my early undergraduate years, I have had the privilege to have been engaged with
numerous research projects related to environmental justice in impoverished and marginalised populations, including in the cyclone-prone coastal communities at the Bay of Bengal, slum settlements in rapidly burgeoning cities, and the largest refugee camps situated in Cox’s Bazar. I realised early on that many of the issues I investigated through my research work were a result of the poor policymaking across environmental and developmental domains that were formulated in siloes and thus suffered from spillovers across each other. Environmental policymaking to me, is an art that appreciates the link between environment, society, economy, and politics, and the systems thinking nature of it was severely lacking in the countries of the Global South.
Therefore, I have been increasingly seeking endeavours that address both policy-driven research and evidence-informed policymaking. In 2022, I graduated with an MPhil in Environmental Policy from Cambridge and have since been involved in numerous initiatives that allowed me to work at the research-policy interface, such as in supporting the preparation and launch of the Human Development Reports by UNDP, contributing to a chapter in the IPBES Nexus Assessment Report, and more recently working on a global report series that advocates for integrated approaches to climate action and sustainable development goals (SDGs), emphasizing the synergies that can be achieved between these two critical areas. The first edition of the series, “Synergy Solutions for a World in Crisis: Tackling Climate and SDG Synergies Together” was already very well received and enriched global policy discussions.
For my PhD, I am investigating what kind of rights and responsibilities shape disaster
management strategies in the Rohingya refugee camps, and how refugees engage with disaster risk, and government and humanitarian organisations led interventions in the face of disasters. I hope to use the findings of my study to not only contribute to camp geographies and disaster studies but also help inform policies and practices in the camps and similar settings.
You can read my research work here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nazifa-Rafa-2
Please reach out to me on my LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazifa-rafa/
I am also available via email: nr501@cam.ac.uk