Enhancing students skills, experience and employability
Patrick Wang, Architecture undergraduate student, pursued an internship in London thanks to the Optimising Student Futures Fund, established with…
Lucy PhD student Nazifa Rafa collaborated on UN report that seeks to maximise synergies between climate action and the SDGs.
In 2021, Nazifa Rafa received the Judy Moody-Stuart Scholarship, established to support graduates of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in undertaking postgraduate study at Cambridge.
The generous support from Sir Mark and Lady Moody-Stuart enabled Nazifa to complete her MPhil in Environmental Policy at Lucy, so that she could go on to begin her PhD at the College last autumn.
Driven by her passion for sustainability, Nazifa has been extensively involved in researching water security, sanitation, hygiene, health, waste management, energy efficiency, and natural resources management in Bangladesh. Nazifa hopes to pursue a career in environmental policymaking, particularly managing natural resources in developing nations sustainably and improving the environmental health of impoverished and marginalised communities.
“Having graduated with an MPhil in Environmental Policy from Cambridge, I am constantly looking to expand my activities in the research-policy interface to not only understand the knowledge gaps that hinder effective policymaking but also explore ways to disseminate my research work in the policy sphere to influence real impact.
My current PhD project focuses on the impact of interactions between the host state and refugee communities on the disaster risk reduction and responses of refugees.
Over the past few months, I have been working in the research and writing team for a report co-convened by the UNFCCC and UNDESA, called Synergy Solutions for a World in Crisis: Tackling Climate and SDG Action Together. It serves to consolidate evidence regarding the increasing recognition of win-win situations arising from synergies between climate and SDG actions, thus advocating for more focused attention toward synergistic policymaking for the two agendas.
The report was successfully launched in September with huge praise from academics and policymakers working in the field, and there are high hopes that it will bring in real policy impact. We have received approval for a phase 2 of the report, where we are hoping to offer deeper analysis, more data, and more developed recommendations in time for the major UN summits in 2024.
I am really excited to see how the report may come to bring in real change. It has been such a privilege for me to have contributed to this report, and I can't wait to begin working on phase 2.
Even until a few years back, I was certain that my dream of learning and training under leading academics who are at the forefront of environmental policymaking and research was nothing short of a fantasy. However, thanks to the generous scholarship, I had all the support I need to transform my previously impossible dream into a miraculous reality”.
What is Lucy's Festival of Giving?
Lucy’s Festival of Giving (12 October – 15 October 2023) is a campaign for a better, fairer future.
