Tackling the effects of climate change on health in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions: Including assessments from countries in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans: Summary of a workshop held in May 2021
This report is an output of a workshop organised by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) in partnership with the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) and the Cyprus Institute, to assess the science base and evaluate options for protecting and promoting human health in the face of climate change in the wider Mediterranean region (that is, countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea and their neighbours).
The workshop resulted in the following key conclusions:
- Commonalities across the region lie in the challenges to health posed by climate change, in the need to develop resilient and equitable health systems, and to address fragmentation of research systems. Science is a global public good and there are unprecedented opportunities to capitalise on scientific advances worldwide to develop the solutions, adapted to local contexts, for all regions.
- There is an importance for the region in developing collaborations between scientific disciplines and countries in research and data collection, sharing infrastructure, skills and methodologies, in order to fill knowledge gaps, avoid wasteful duplication of research effort, and build trust in responsible science with other stakeholders.
- The scientific community must work together not only to generate new knowledge but also to advise how to use the knowledge that is already available, as a resource for innovation, to guide practice and inform public policy options.
- There must be integration in the use of the scientific evidence for policy across sectors. Health issues are relevant to the formulation of policy in many sectors beyond the formal responsibility of health sector policy-makers.
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