Planetary health requires a better understanding of the reciprocal negative effects and co-benefits between environment, environmental changes and degradations, and human health and well-being. This holds at all geographical and temporal scales and at all decision-making levels. Local communities of low- and medium-income countries, living in cross-border areas, face both the negative effects of environmental changes and degradations, impacting their health and well being, and particular socio-political contexts that enhance their vulnerability. MOSAIC states that these populations are capable of interpreting and exploiting complex and multi-thematic information about their surroundings, in order to identify and understand the impacts of the environment on their wellbeing and to develop locally feasible, acceptable, and sustainable adaptation and mitigation solutions. However, knowledge about the cascading effects of the environment on the lifestyle, health and well-being of local communities need to be better established and shared. Moreover, these communities' access to information is generally poor, and they do not necessarily possess the scientific skills (literacy) needed to take full advantage of it.
In such a context, MOSAIC aims to design and implement open, multimodal and replicable information ecosystems intended to support cross-border communities to gain a better understanding of the environment in which they live and understand the impact of this environment on their well-being, in order to help them build a health-promoting environment and influence public debate and policy. It relies on the Open Science principles, in particular: i) the joint mobilisation of participatory science, open access principles, open access data infrastructures, as well as ecological and health sciences, ii) the co-production and use of data and knowledge by all project stakeholders, with shared values.
MOSAIC will consider two bio-regions particularly affected by climate change, extreme climatic events, and land cover degradation, East Africa and the Amazon. More specifically, it will focus on three cross-border study areas: Colombia, Peru and Brazil triple-border; French Guiana - Brazil border; Kenya - Tanzania border (Maasai pastoralist communities).These study sites allow for implementation and evaluation of project developments, the testing of the reproducibility and reusability of methods, data and tools, and the facilitation of inter- and transdisciplinarity through the joint mobilisation of a multidisciplinary team.
