Project description
Navigating the global nexus of climate, plastic and antimicrobial resistance
Planet-wide, the interplay of climate change, plastic pollution, and antimicrobial resistance poses a profound threat to the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. However, our understanding of how these crises interact is severely limited. In this context, the EU-funded TULIP project aims to unravel the complex connections between plastic pollution and antimicrobial resistance under the influence of a changing climate. Specifically, the project uses advanced methods to understand driving factors and policies, while designing community-based solutions. TULIP transforms evidence into decision-support tools, promoting triple-win solutions for human and ecosystem health. Engaging communities, policymakers, and experts, TULIP focusses on aquatic environments in the Philippines and Italy, with plans for pan-European impact.
Objective
Interconnections between ecological and societal systems facilitate compounding impacts of climate change, environmental plastic pollution and proliferation of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on the health of people, animals and ecosystems on a planetary scale. Current knowledge on interactions between these three crises in the Earth’s natural systems and their impact on health is highly restricted. TULIP will apply a transdisciplinary socio-ecological systems thinking approach, robust environmental science methods, epidemiology, modelling, sampling design and state-of-the-art molecular tools to generate scientific evidence on plastic-AMR interactions. It will describe spatio-temporal dynamics and patterns of plastic-associated AMR under a changing climate and the compounding health and ecological impacts. It will employ the methodology of intervention and social sciences to explore social driving factors and current policies and design and evaluate community-based interventions and nature-based solutions. TULIP will convert created evidence to modelling-based decision-supporting tools that approximate co-benefits to human and ecosystem health, indicators and environmental policy recommendations highlighting triple-win solutions and foster the science-policy translation using an integrated knowledge translation framework. Aiming to ignite a lasting societal change toward health-promoting environments, TULIP will engage communities, citizen scientists, policymakers and experts from multiple sectors in research, co-design, co-implementation, communication and dissemination processes. TULIP will focus on aquatic environments as they create a milieu for interactions, transport pathways and exposure interface and showcase its approach in the Philippines and Italy and translate to a pan-European scale.
Fields of science
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic healthepidemiology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacydrug resistanceantibiotic resistance
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
69120 Heidelberg
Germany