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Maia Golzar Anderson is an Iranian-American Jewish researcher and writer who focuses on the intersection of human rights and climate change, transnational and diasporic politics, and international law. She holds two undergraduate degrees from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she studied natural resource sovereignty, climate resilience in Palestine, and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. She served as a Research Assistant for the Climate and Water Program at the Middle East Institute in 2022-23, where she researched environmental adaptation and climate diplomacy.
Iran has yet to ratify the 2015 Paris Agreement, but efforts to address the impact of climate change have great potential to create opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation, building on the recent trend of regional de-escalation. Climate diplomacy represents an untapped opportunity for Iran to engage globally by incentivizing it to adopt the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals in exchange for sanctions or debt relief.
