Mauritius
United Nations Climate Technology Centre & Network
Advancing Urban Climate Resilience for Small Island Nations
Located deep in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius is over 1,000 miles from the nearest continent. Like other small island nations, this remote location does not protect it from the threats of climate change: It leaves it more vulnerable. Reeshabh Shayan Tupsee is building a career translating his country’s vulnerability into policy language governments can act on.
“Mauritius sits at the convergence of nearly every urban climate risk, including coastal erosion, flooding, heat stress, and infrastructure vulnerability,” he said. “Yet, our cities — our experience, our knowledge — rarely feature in the policy literature that shapes global adaptation frameworks and priorities.”
A climate law and policy expert, Tupsee is completing a Bachelor of Laws degree at the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas and serves as a Gender and Climate Technology Expert for the UN Climate Technology Centre & Network. In his work, he tackles complex governance challenges, such as how to translate multilateral commitments into enforceable climate policy.
Tupsee enrolled in the Urban Climate Leadership certificate to build technical skills and greater scientific literacy to understand the gap between what adaptation science recommends and what governance systems make possible.
“I was not looking for abstract theory but for frameworks I could immediately apply, so the focus on practitioner-led approaches and place-based solutions was a draw,” he said.
The program also gave him a global perspective, with comparative examples from around the work to draw from. For his capstone, though, Tupsee turned his attention back to Mauritius, developing a national flood resilience plan — exactly the kind of practical, solutions-oriented, and small island-focused work he joined the program to pursue.
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Breaking Down Silos to Increase Climate Resilience in Central Asia
Emergency management and climate adaptation are often treated as separate issues. In Kazakhstan, though, disaster risk is “inseparable” from climate change.
“Kazakhstan sits at the intersection of a number of converging climate pressure, water stress, extreme weather events, and degrading ecosystems,” said Nigmyat Nurtaza, who specializes in water security, disaster risk reduction, and climate resilience in Central Asia. “I wanted both the conceptual frameworks and the practical tools to respond to those challenges more effectively.”
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