Emma Lawrance
Dr Emma Lawrance is a recognised global leader in the emerging field of climate change and mental health. She has the privilege of working with researchers, policy makers and experts by lived experience around the world to understand how the effects of a changing climate affects people's mental health and wellbeing, how climate action can create a mentally healthier world, and what skills and cultures can enable people to cope and contribute to the futures they desire.
Her research is grounded in co-production with lived experience experts, and always seeks to connect emerging evidence with change in policy and practice. Particular areas of focus include: the effects of heat on mental health; how youth mental health is shaped by a changing climate; the psychology of climate action; the co-design, implementation and evaluation of climate-relevant mental health interventions; development of frameworks, metrics and measures to assess the mental health impact of climate change and mental health benefits of climate action; protecting the mental health of people working in climate spaces; policy-research to assess and guide the appropriate integration of climate and mental health policy.
Emma was the Founder and Director of the Climate Cares Centre at Imperial College London, before joining the Department of Psychiatry in 2026, the new home for Climate Cares. Climate Cares works internationally across research, policy, education and intervention design to understand and drive action on the interconnections between the health of the climate and our minds. Emma also leads the Wellcome-funded global initiative Connecting Climate Minds (hub.connectingclimateminds.org) to connect, shape and facilitate the climate and mental health field.
Emma raises awareness of how climate change is a risk multiplier for mental health and how climate action is an opportunity multiplier for mental health through talks to audiences across public health, psychiatry, neuroscience, policy experts, climate scientists, journalists, economists, educators and students. She has spoken at the World Economic Forum "summer Davos" event, COP26, COP27, COP28, COP29, World Congress of Psychiatry, Global Mental Health Action Network and other international events. She has been featured in international tv, radio and print media, including Die Zeit, Al Jazeera, The Times, the Guardian, Forbes, Reuters, Sky News and the BBC. She is an advisor to the OECD Wellbeing and Mental Health Group, the WHO REACH project, and has guest edited special issues for the International Review of Psychiatry and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Emma’s background is in physics and chemistry (BSc (Hons), Flinders University), science communication (Grad Dip, Australian National University) and neuroscience (MSc, University of Oxford). A variety of previous roles include work across science communication and science education. For her DPhil in Clinical Neuroscience she used fMRI and computational modelling to examine how uncertainty is processed in the brain and affects decisions, particularly for those with a tendency to experience anxiety. She also examined the interactions between perceptual uncertainty and strategy uncertainty, and how our brain integrates this information to modulate attentional systems for goal-directed behaviour.