Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme wildfires and smoke haze pollution in Southeast Asia and Australia, exacerbating respiratory and cardiovascular illness, and contributing to thousands of premature deaths. Severe smoke haze from wildfires in Sumatra, Indonesia in 2015 resulted in around 100,000 excess deaths. In Australia, smoke from the 2019/20 Black Summer wildfires was associated with 417 deaths. Although current impact estimates highlight the public health challenge posed by wildfires, they do not specifically attribute the impacts of wildfire smoke to climate change. Nor do they specifically focus on sensitive population groups disproportionally affected by climate change. This project aims to use climate attribution modelling and storylines to assess the influence of climate change on the risk and characteristics of extreme wildfires and related smoke haze exposure, and on the health of Indigenous people, pregnant women and children in five heavily affected regions of Southeast Asia and Australia. The project engages policymakers, Indigenous peoples and communities, citizen scientists and artists in the participatory co-design of innovative communication tools based on climate attribution science, health impact data, and the culture and lived experiences of communities suffering extreme or recurrent wildfires in Thailand, Laos, Indonesia and Australia.

Service user involvement is an essential component for promoting recovery orientated mental health services and has been strongly advocated both by international medical institutions and service users’ organizations. Several universities in Europe have adopted this approach to nursing education and recruited service users to participate in mental health nursing education. One aim of this approach is to encourage students to adopt a recovery oriented approach, rather than an illness oriented approach to practice. This reflects the requirements of modern mental health services. Only the first steps have been taken in this direction and the universities participating in Commune project are at different levels in this development. Therefore our first objective was to co-produce teaching material in mental health nursing with equal contribution from service users’ educators and nurse academics. This coproduced approach to developing teaching materials has not, to our best knowledge, been tried before. To take the concept of co-production further, and train and empower the service users’ educators, they were responsible for the teaching of the teaching module that was co-produced. Throughout this process we aimed at giving the less experienced universities and service users educators an opportunity to learn from the more experienced ones.Furthermore, In Europe and Australia, there is a growing need for mental health care and hence increasing opportunity for nurses to pursue a career in mental health nursing. However mental health nursing is not a popular career choice. Therefore the second objective was to encourage nursing students to consider a career in mental health nursing by providing them with the opportunity to understand the experience of mental distress from the perspective of the service users. Seven Universities in five European countries and Australia took part in the project. These are all higher education institution at tertiary level. Collaborating organisations were the local mental health care users’ organisations in the home cities of the participating universities. The projects activities had three main components. (1) The development and the teaching of a co-produced learning module in mental health recovery. The module was taught by 18 service users to 825 BS-level nursing students in all participating universities. (2) The assessment/outcome of the teaching and other research activities. Qualitative research was undertaken to gain valuable service user perspectives as preparation of the development of the learning module. The impact of the module on both students and service users educators was evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methods. (3) The development of a Best Practice Handbook that will offer mental health nursing academics and service user educators guidance in implementing the learning module or similar modules in the future. Teaching the learning module positively impacted both the nursing students and the Experts by Experience as the assessment studies have shown. The students became more exceptive of the social and institutional inclusion of people labelled with mental health illnesses and felt they were better prepared for a career in the mental health field (Happell, et al., 2018). The service users educators felt empowered by the teaching and better prepared for future teaching activities. Three papers that came out of the project have already been published, two are under review and more have been drafted. The project and its outcomes have been presented in numerous national and international conferences. Furthermore, the project has given the participants from different countries an opportunity to learn from each other. The participating universities and user movements are on different levels of service users educators involvement and the project gave the novices opportunity to learn from those more experienced.On the basis of our evaluations, observations and feedback, we strongly believe the project will have long-term benefits both locally and internationally. The positive findings will be used to encourage other universities to embed service users educators within their curricula, and will encourage the participating universities to strengthen their service users educators involvement. By conducting the project transnationally we hope to ensure that the teaching material and the experience of its development and implementation will have relevance beyond the countries involved and can be adapted to the needs of nursing educators in different countries. To achieve this a Best Practice Handbook which describes the process of the project and the learning module is available for all at the projects homepage: https://www.commune.hi.is

EMPOWER is a multidisciplinary research and innovation effort aiming to developing, implementing, evaluating and disseminating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a modular eHealth intervention platform to promote health and well-being, reduce psychological distress, prevent common mental health problems and reduce their impact in the workplace. In collaboration with stakeholders, we will adapt existing effective interventions focused on different components (awareness and stigma, workplace conditions and psychosocial factors, stress, common mental health symptoms, early detection, comorbidity, lifestyle, and return to work) to created a combined online modular platform feasible in various workplace settings by culturally and contextually adapting it. The intervention will be implemented through a randomized controlled trial directed to employees and employers of small and medium sized enterprises and public agencies from three European countries (Spain, Finland and Poland). Both qualitative and quantitative methods will be used in the evaluation of the individual health outcomes, cost-effectiveness (from a social, economical, employer and employees perspective), and implementation facilitators and barriers. Implementation strategies relevant to the uptake of the EMPOWER intervention will be identified, including a realistic appraisal of barriers to uptake as well as evidence-based solutions to these barriers. Through scaling-up pre-existing effective and cost-effective interventions, EMPOWER is aimed at addressing the overarching challenges from different perspectives, including individual level (e.g., addressing stigma, mental health, well-being and lifestyles, taking into account legal, cultural and gender issues) and organizational level. The main outcomes effort will help employees, employers and policymakers in decision processes of new legal and contractual framework at EU and national level covering the new economy landscape.

With increasing recognition of the importance of insects, there are growing concerns that insect biodiversity has declined globally, with serious consequences for ecosystem function and services. Yet, gaps in knowledge limit progress in understanding the magnitude and direction of change. Information about insect trends is fragmented, and time-series data are restricted and unrepresentative, both taxonomically and spatially. Moreover, causal links between insect trends and anthropogenic pressures are not well-established. It is, therefore, difficult to evaluate stories about "insectageddon", to understand the ecosystem consequences, to devise mitigation strategies, or predict future trends. To address the shortfalls, we will bring together diverse sources of information, such as meta-analyses, correlative relationships and expert judgement. GLiTRS will collate these diverse lines of evidence on how insect biodiversity has changed in response to anthropogenic pressures, how responses vary according to functional traits, over space, and across biodiversity metrics (e.g. species abundance, occupancy, richness and biomass), and how insect trends drive further changes (e.g. mediated by interaction networks). We will integrate these lines of evidence into a Threat-Response model describing trends in insect biodiversity across the globe. The model will be represented in the form of a series of probabilistic statements (a Bayesian belief network) describing relationships between insect biodiversity and anthropogenic pressures. By challenging this "Threat-Response model" to predict trends for taxa and places where high-quality time series data exist, we will identify insect groups and regions for which indirect data sources are a) sufficient for predicting recent trends, b) inadequate, or c) too uncertain. Knowledge about the predictability of threat-response relationships will allow projections - with uncertainty estimates - of how insect biodiversity has changed globally, across all major taxa, functional groups and biomes. This global perspective on recent trends will provide the basis for an exploration of the consequences of insect decline for a range of ecosystem functions and services, as well as how biodiversity and ecosystem properties might be affected by plausible scenarios of future environmental change. GLiTRS is an ambitious and innovative research program: two features are particularly ground-breaking. First, the collation of multiple forms of evidence will permit a truly global perspective on insect declines that is unachievable using conventional approaches. Second, by validating "prior knowledge" (from evidence synthesis) with recent trends, we will assess the degree to which insect declines are predictable, and at what scales.