Progetto

ISMED-CLIM project

Descrizione

Climate change poses one of the greatest risks to human health, with rising air pollution, increasing surface temperatures, and more frequent extreme weather events. The Mediterranean region, situated between temperate and arid climates, has been identified as one of Europe’s climate change hotspots by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The region’s average temperature increase surpasses the global average, and frequent extreme temperature events and forest fires, as reported by the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT), impact both mortality and morbidity. The challenges towards addressing climate change impacts in Mediterranean region, include the mobilization of local stakeholders and citizens regarding the extreme health risks and the need to implement mitigation solutions. Moreover, the existing alert systems for reducing exposure to heat and air pollution, are not efficient. Another challenge is the utilization of existing vector disease models to generate short-and long-term assessment in order to keep high risk populations safe. Further, risk assessment, emergency plans and mitigation solutions are missing. Finally, effective evidence-based forecast, along with early warning and early response systems and decision-making models are also a challenge.The vision of ISMED – CLIM is to address all the aforementioned challenges by focusing mainly on increasing the preparedness and ability of health systems in the Mediterranean region. In this context, knowledge, policy decision and action-oriented tools will be developed in order to deliver safe and effective care to citizens, regarding the ongoing climate change.

Obiettivi

The project’s key objectives are as follows: 1.     Enhance the understanding of climate change effects on the non-communicable diseases (NDC) and vector-borne infections across representative European countries within the Mediterranean. 2.     Quantify how public health interventions integrating state-of-the-art technologies, public and social media can reduce personal exposures to heat and air pollution and associated health effects. 3.     Validate the feasibility and user acceptance among high-risk professionals of a regional early warning and risk prediction tool. 4.     Employ open, participatory, and co-creative methodologies to locally adapt and refine existing evidence-based practices and prototype tools to increase the preparedness and ability of health systems.

Docenti

prof.ssa Antonella Agodi; prof.ssa Martina Barchitta; prof. Francesco Mazzeo Rinaldi

Tempi

2024 - 2028

Link

eoc.org