The lingering effects of a dry and hot summer, with record-breaking temperatures on land and in the seas, are still clearly visible and palpable when the annual EUPeace conference opens at the University of Calabria at the end of September. Just how worrying these records are – and, above all, for whom in particular – is the subject of a keynote speech by Pooja Jha, editor-in-chief of the renowned journal The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. The conference theme – “Global warming and its impact: Connections with emerging conflicts, migrations, and health issues” – sets the agenda. Indeed, it is precisely this link between global warming and the associated health risks, particularly for migrants, that is also the focus of a commission which Jha helped to establish.
When Three Crises Become One
For most of modern public health research, climate change and migration have been studied in separate silos. Climate scientists look at rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and shifting disease patterns. Migration researchers track population movements, integration outcomes, and social determinants of health. But what happens when someone is displaced because of climate change, crosses a border, and then tries to access healthcare in a country whose systems were not designed with them in mind or who won’t acknowledge them? That question falls into a gap — and it is a gap that carries real human consequences.
İlke Şanlıer and Çağla Okyar from Çukurova University are actively involved in EUPeace’s Research Hubs on ‘Migration and Human Rights’ and ‘Inclusive Health and Well-Being’. The data produced in their work and in the discussions of their respective Hubs shows the need of broader initiatives, which is why they support the work of The Lancet Regional Health – Europe Commission on Climate Change, Migration, Displacement and Health, launched in 2024, and the invitation of Pooja Jha to the EUPeace Conference 2026. Co-chaired by Professor Bernadette Kumar of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Professor Karl Blanchet of the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Medicine, the Commission is one of the most ambitious attempts yet to map the interconnections between these three fields across the WHO European Region. Its goal is not simply to produce a report. It is to generate the kind of evidence base that can actually shape policy — across health ministries, border agencies, climate adaptation strategies, and humanitarian responses.
The core problem the Commission identifies is one of hidden data. Information about the health of migrants is frequently buried inside general population statistics, where it becomes invisible. Averages smooth over disparities. National datasets often exclude people without settled legal status. The result is that policymakers making decisions about healthcare infrastructure, climate adaptation, or migration management are doing so without a clear picture of who is most at risk and why. The members of the Commission, coming from various disciplinary backgrounds, are working to change that. Making that data visible — and making it impossible to ignore — is one of the Commission’s central tasks.
Science That Is Supposed to Make People Uncomfortable
The Commission is deliberately constructed to be cross-sectoral. It brings together researchers, politicians, and civil society actors — not to produce consensus for its own sake, but to generate evidence from every angle and to confront wherever the gaps are. Pooja Jha made the Commission’s ambition clear in her talk at the 2026 EUPeace Conference held at the University of Calabria: “The Commission should annoy one party or another. Otherwise, it has not done its job well.”
That is a deliberately provocative statement — and an important one. Independent scientific commissions that set out to please everyone tend to produce findings that challenge no one. By contrast, a commission that is willing to present uncomfortable evidence to governments, institutions, or civil society organisations — whoever needs to hear it — is far more likely to drive genuine change. In a political climate where the perceived defunding of climate science in the United States is shrinking the global evidence base, Europe’s role as a frontrunner in climate research carries additional weight. The work of commissions like this one does not simply fill an academic gap; it fills a geopolitical one.
Open and interdisciplinary work for change
This interdisciplinary work, which extends from the university into civil society, shows the kind of impact the Research Hubs aim to achieve within EUPeace. At EUPeace, the European University for Peace, Justice, and Inclusive Societies, researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds have come together in the Research Hubs to promote European values. For the Research Hub “Inclusive Health and Well-Being”, a key priority in Calabria was not only to bring together its researchers from the nine partner universities, but also to provide a platform for stakeholders such as Jha.
The urgency is not hypothetical. Extreme heat, flooding, drought and ecosystem collapse are already reshaping where people can safely live, and health systems across Europe are under growing pressure. The question the Commission is asking (how do these forces interact, and who bears the greatest burden?) is one that European societies will have to answer, whether or not they do so on the basis of solid evidence. The work of Şanlıer, Okyar and Jha, and of the wider networks they contribute to, such as the Research Hubs and the Commission, makes the case that they should.
