Environmental disasters in recent decades have drawn scholarly attention to the need to move beyond traditional area studies boundaries in order to understand the wide-reaching impacts of events like tsunamis, cyclones, and, more broadly, climate change. This essay reflects on the efforts of one research team, led by Nathalie Peutz and Alden Young, to disrupt regional divides between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and to study climate change across the littoral states of the Red Sea arena. As the authors highlight, successful collaboration across regions and in this time of multiple crises entails the constant negotiation of constraints and disruptions.
Aisha Al-Sarihi
Aisha Al-Sarihi is a nonresident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. She has a research interest in environmental sustainability, energy and climate economics and policies. She obtained her PhD at Imperial College's Centre for Environmental Policy, with a focus on studying challenges and policies for renewable energy adoption in oil-producing countries. Following her PhD, Al-Sarihi pursued her postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics and Political Science's Middle East Centre, working on assessing the economic implications of climate change in the GCC. She also joined the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, with a focus on studying the challenges and opportunities for aligning climate policies with economic diversification strategies in Saudi Arabia and was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.