Dr. Rita Issa is a visiting fellow at FXB where she explores how ill-health and loss due to climate change can be recognised and managed through structural responses such as the UN Loss and Damage mechanism. Rita‘s experience is in the intersections of health, climate change, justice, and building community agency and capacity. She is a family medicine doctor practicing in East London (UK), and a humanitarian medic, having worked with MSF, WHO, Primary Care International, and aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise.
Rita comes to FXB from the UEA where she is funded by the Leverhulme Trust under the ‘Critical Decade for Climate Change program’, and the UCL Institute for Global Health/ Lancet Migration where she led work on the intersections of climate change, migration and health. Alongside other academic outputs, she’s co-editor of BMJ book of the year – the ‘Handbook of Refugee Health’ (Taylor Francis), and the upcoming text ‘Resistance, activism and social movements in health and healthcare’ (Oxford University Press).
Rita’s humanitarian, advocacy and academic outputs have appeared in a number of media outlets, including as a columnist for the Independent, BBC news, Sky, Al Jazeera, and Novara Media. She has (co)founded a number of advocacy groups and activist mobilisations, and her contributions to the fields of climate change and health have been recognised in the London Mayor’s Sustainable City Awards as “Public Sector Changemaker of the Year 2022”.