3.E. Workshop: The Role of Digital Public Health in the European Climate Pact and Green deal
Authors:   Organised by: EUPH-DH, EUPHA-ENV, WHO/Europe, Climate Reality Leaders,   Chair persons: Luis Lapao (Portugal), Marija Jevtic (EUPHA-ENV)
Published: October 2021

Europe is facing two major structural changes: the climate crisis, having a significant impact on public health, and digitalization of the economy, that could play a role in mitigating climate change and its impacts on public health. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected our lives in many ways including how we see public health, the climate change and has created the conditions for the almost exponential growth for telemedicine and digitalization in healthcare. Underlining that the world is facing an increasing innovation and integration of digital tools to address public health and environmental problems, as the UN Secretary-General and the Director-General of the World Health Organization both declared that we are currently fighting a climate “pandemic” in the same way as we are fighting COVID-19. Digital solutions have been implemented to address COVID-19 and impacted by reducing CO2 emissions and improving quality of life. Digital systems, including Artificial Intelligence, robots and drones, are now changing the paradigm of public health and environment management. Due to the complex nature of the information ecosystem our societies and communities live in, a digital public health approach can be managed to reduce harm to individual, community and population health, support social cohesion and trust in emergency response and interventions to deal with climate change. Digital health could, within 10 years establish a new paradigm in public and environmental health. Public health professionals need urgently to tackle digital health to bridge the gap with others areas of healthcare. During the COVID-19 crisis, national public health authorities have been challenged in the way they communicate with the public, engage with communities in collecting data to improve response, providing the scientific evidence, the day-to-day facts and figures. Likewise, The European Climate Pact provides a space for collectively develop and implement climate solutions. The Climate Pact is an open, inclusive and evolving initiative for climate action through an online platform and citizen dialogues and exchanges, it will foster the link between the digital and green transition. This workshop aims to share the experiences of digital public health interventions with significant impact on climate change mitigation during the pandemic. It will be organised as a round table, starting by setting the scene with an introduction to key digital health concepts and challenges. Each speaker will give a short pitch on how they have experienced the challenge of using digital systems in public health and how they approached its management during the crisis. This will be followed by a panel discussion. Participants will have ample time to ask questions to the panellists. The workshop will end with a summary of a selection of tools participants can use in their own environmental management activities and key take home messages from the panellist will be provided as a conclusion.

Key messages

Digital Public Health has been establishing evidence on interventions with significant effects on reducing the impact of climate crisis. A Partnership is needed across the health system and society to manage this crisis. European Green Deal and Climate Pact could be used as a roadmap in digital public health.