December 17, 2025
The Wellcome Trust awarded a major grant of $5.45 million to support Youth in Urban Centres Across the Americas (YUCA), a five-year project aimed at better understanding how increasing exposure to heat affects the mental health of young people in urban areas. This is an international collaboration bringing together teams from Canada, the United States, Mexico and Argentina.
A unique project
YUCA aims to:
- Examine, using multi- and transdisciplinary approaches, one of the most pressing societal challenges: the impact of extreme temperatures on the mental health of young people.
- Characterise the environmental, social, physiological and biological mechanisms linking heat to symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychosis in young people aged 16 to 35.
- Develop, with young people, tools and interventions to better manage mental health in the context of the climate crisis.
The project is distinguished by its continental scope, with cohorts monitored in Montreal, Querétaro and Buenos Aires, and by its innovative multi-species approach, which will generate unique data useful to the entire scientific community.
Contribution of the Douglas teams
Scientific contribution by Drs. Mallar Chakravarty and Lani Cupo
While Dr. Jura Augustinavicius oversees the YUCA project as a whole, Drs. Chakravarty and Cupo will lead the Douglas Research Centre’s contribution to this international endeavour. They will collect a range of data during heat exposure (like during heat waves) related to mental health outcomes, physiological measurements (collected via smart watches), and brain anatomy and function using magnetic resonance imaging performed at the Douglas’s Cerebral Imaging Centre. Furthermore, Dr. Chakravarty will use open-science principles to ensure that data and results are made widely available to researchers and the public world-wide.
“This project is vital as increasingly visible climate change is likely to increase climate anxiety, especially among youth, potentially leading to serious mental health challenges. By joining forces on this ambitious, large-scale international initiative, we have the opportunity to create real, immediate change for the benefit of future generations.”
— Dr. Mallar Chakravarty, Douglas Research Centre, co-applicant
Role of the Youth Councils of the CEYMH
Another key aim of the project that will be carried out at the Douglas through this collaboration is the development of an intervention to help reduce the impact of heat on mental health. This will be co-developed with youth experiencing mental health symptoms to ensure it addresses the most urgent needs. The youth councils of the Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health (CEYMH), led by Chelsea Cuffaro and supported by Tosh Watson, play a strategic role in the governance of the project. These young people—adolescents (aged 13–17) and young adults (aged 18–25)—co-designed the proposed components and will collaborate with youth councils in Querétaro and Buenos Aires.
“The CEYMH Youth Councils have been at the forefront of shaping how lived experience directs research that addresses critical questions that impact the well-being of our youth – such as the unfolding effects of climate change on our mental health. We are very pleased to see Wellcome Trust recognizing their innovative contributions once again by funding YUCA, a global initiative led by Prof. Augustinavicius with colleagues from Mexico, USA and Argentina.”
— Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, Douglas Research Centre, co-applicant
Understand, predict and act
The lead researchers point out that heatwaves are expected to triple in the coming decades, with serious but as yet poorly understood effects on young people’s mental health.
“We will adapt existing mental health services to integrate intervention components that protect mental health in the context of heat and that have been co-designed with youth. Our project will generate novel datasets from middle- and high-income countries across diverse contexts and research processes that can be used by the broader scientific community in the future to advance research in this area.”
— Dr. Jura Augustinavicius, Université de Montréal, Lead applicant
The YUCA project will thus enable interventions to be better targeted, support mental health systems and help young people adapt to future climate realities.
Resources and external links
To learn more about the YUCA project and its partners, consult the following resources: