Climate Change Symposium
On 5th May 2023, Associate Professor Tomislav Mestrovic, who is an expert in global health in the University North, Croatia, invited the GREAT project partners to give a keynote presentation in a hybrid Symposium on Climate Change, which was co-organised by the American Society for Microbiology and University North, Croatia. The Symposium was called “Five Minutes to Twelve: Navigating the Nexus of Infectious Diseases, Public Health and Environmental Sustainability within the Context of Climate Change”. The keynote presentations from different climate change scientists included an overview of climate change and public health, influence of global warming, and risks of plastic packaging pollution.
Professor Paul Hollins, a work package leader of GREAT, presented the project online. As we were only three months into the project at this time, Paul shared the goals, plans, as well as academic and commercial partners of the project. The audience included climate change and global health experts as well as university students specializing in these topics in Croatia. There was much interest from especially the students concerning our games approach to raising awareness of the climate emergency. The participants voiced that they were very much looking forward to the results and findings that we will obtain in our project, and how such global problems can be alleviated, if we could gain a large amount of data from citizens, which aim to influence policy-makers on their decision-making process toward the climate emergency.
In order to accelerate climate change actions and policies, Tomislav Mestrovic is planning to host a larger symposium event on Climate Change next year and it would be an excellent opportunity for the GREAT project to be in-person at this annual event to share the project findings obtained from now until then. These will include our pilot and cycle studies, effective intervention design of climate dilemmas, lessons learnt as well as the dialogues achieved between citizens and policy-makers. We thank Tomislav Mestrovic for the invitation and look forward to meeting him next year in person for further collaboration on topics including climate change policies!
Paul wrote a small post about this on LinkedIn too.