Maria Nilsson is a Professor in Public health with the orientation climate change and health. She is based at the department of Epidemiology and global health, Umeå University. Her research interest is focused on climate change health adaptation with a specific interest for vulnerable populations, on risk- and health communication and on knowledge translation. Including perspectives as equity, justice and human rights are central in her work.
Maria leads externally funded projects in low- and middle-income countries, but also in Europe and Sweden. She was the integrating editor for health in the Lancet Commission ”Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health” published in 2015. She has co-led the working group on adaptation planning and resilience in ”The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change” since 2016. It is an international, multi-disciplinary research collaboration running until 2030 following on from the 2015 Lancet Commission aiming at tracking health impacts and the world’s response to climate change.
She was part of an expert group for an EASAC project on Climate Change and Health that published the report “The imperative of climate action to protect human health in Europe” in mid-2019. EASAC (the European Academies´ Science Advisory Council) is formed by the national science academies of the EU Member States to enable them to collaborate in providing independent science advice to European policymakers. She is member of another EASAC-expert group that will publish a report in 2021 for Europe on decarbonisation of buildings.
Maria was awarded a SIGHT fellowship in 2017 for global health leadership. SIGHT (Swedish Institute for Global Health Transformation) is under the auspices of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
She is the Editor in chief for the open access journal Global Health Action, a journal that aims at narrowing health information gaps and contributing to the implementation of policies and actions that lead to improved global health. The journal seeks to contribute a concrete, hands-on approach to addressing the global health challenges brought to the fore by the impact of globalization.