Last week UC Davis welcomed Humphrey Fellows from 27 countries and 11 Humphrey host campuses for an Enhancement Workshop on Climate Change. The workshop’s objective was to strengthen Fellows’ knowledge of climate change and develop skills for communicating climate change issues within their workplaces and communities back home. Topics discussed included climate change science and policy, justice and reparations, and water and irrigation tools. The workshop also featured a full day of programming led by Humphrey alumna Itzel Morales. Ms. Morales was a Humphrey Fellow at UC Davis from 2016-2017 and is the Climate Leader Engagement Director for the Climate Reality Project America Latina in Mexico. As the workshop concluded, Fellows presented their action plans, outlining their top takeaways from the workshop and their next steps for working on climate change communication in their home countries. Some Fellows shared their key takeaways: 

As someone who works in the hospitality industry managing operations and human resources, Lite Seruvakula (MSU) from Fiji shared, “The workshop made me realize the huge role HR could play in planning and executing climate change strategies in organizations by working in partnership with the local community.” 

Ana Lucía Ortega (UC Davis), specializing in public finance and energy regulation, shared that her action plan from this workshop is to “create a solar entrepreneur strategy for women in Colombia and contribute to the protection of my country’s natural biodiversity.” 

Tashi Dorji P (BU) from Bhutan shares,” my exposure to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines and General Circulation Models (GCM) are useful for implementing climate change-related plans at the national level.” As a Chief Program Officer at the Royal Civil Service Commission in Bhutan, he plans to ensure that any federal programs around infrastructure and agriculture are screened through the IPCC framework. He also intends to use GCM models to predict climate change impact in Bhutan and inform national policies based on this scientific information. 

The workshop was a joint effort between UC Davis and the Stockholm Environment Institute, which has hosted nearly a dozen Humphrey Fellows for Professional Affiliations over the past decade. 

VCU Humphrey Fellow Amanda Moses Ferreira is a forensic chemist working at the Trinidad and Tobago Forensic Science Center, a national agency responsible for analyzing the various cannabinoid products confiscated in her country. The number and types of cannabinoid-based products there have increased significantly in online and retail outlets. Unfortunately, these new products are often poorly regulated, and little is known about what is in them. Knowing this, Ms. Ferreira wanted to learn more about improving the testing of these products. As a result, she started her professional affiliation last October with Dr. Michelle Peace at the Department of Forensic Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, on a scientific research project analyzing the chemicals found in these novel cannabinoid products. Her contributions to this research project are detailed in the publication entitled “Cannabinoid-based vaping products and supplement formulations reported by consumers to precipitate adverse effects,” published by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Drug Testing and Analysis.

In this paper, Ms. Ferreira and her colleagues report on chemical analyses of various cannabinoid products that had adverse effects on persons who used them. They found these products often contained a wide variety of purely synthetic cannabinoids not found in the cannabis plant. In addition, most of these synthetic cannabinoids had never been tested for safety and may be responsible for some adverse effects. Ms. Ferreira plans to use these new technical skills back home and continue working with stakeholders locally and internationally to identify new psychoactive substances in Trinidad and the Caribbean.

Humphrey alumna Liana Sahakyan is the Founder and President of the NGO Sose Women's Issues. The organization is named after Sose Mayrik, a woman who fought in the Armenian Liberation Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Given the organization's mission, it recently launched the "Women's Empowerment for Community Engagement"  program for women and girls in the Vayots Dzor, Gegharkunik, and Syunik regions in Armenia, with plans to expand to the Lori region as well. The program was created to promote women's participation in politics by strengthening their understanding of Armenia's political system and developing their political negotiation skills. Participants engage with active and influential politicians to learn about Armenia's political landscape and the importance of women's engagement in the political process. They are also exposed to practical tools to recognize disinformation aimed at women and trained to participate in debate simulations. Through the program, participants have also provided employment for women in the Vardenis community, created a youth center in the Artsvakar district, and installed benches in the Drakhtik village. 

Liana Sahakyan was a Humphrey Fellow at the University of Washington from 2014-2015. During her fellowship, she focused on nonprofit management, fund and grant development, and economic empowerment for women to help her organization grow and scale its impact. 

Humphrey Alumna Ioana Tamas works as an Associate Project Officer, Diversity of Cultural Expressions Entity for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). She shared her recent project publication, the 2022 UNESCO Global Report, Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity: Addressing Culture as a Global Public Good, which is one of UNESCO's flagship publications and the only flagship report in the field of culture. It maps out the policies and measures implemented around the world to promote the diversity of cultural expressions and raise awareness about the importance of the arts in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This report's trends, innovative practices, gaps, and recommendations provide valuable evidence to inform the policy dialogue leading up to the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development taking place in September. 

Ioana Tamas was a Humphrey Fellow at the University of Maryland from 2015-2016. During her fellowship, she specialized in cultural policies and worked with the National Endowment for the Arts on data research and analysis of how the United States funds the arts. Before working for UNESCO, she worked for the Ministry of Culture in her home country, Romania, and the European Cultural Foundation in the Netherlands.