Interview series – Discover the MOSAIC project
Emmanuel Roux, MOSAIC Coordinator
Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)
Can you introduce the project and its progression over the past 18 months?
MOSAIC examines how Open Science can equip transdisciplinary health approaches to ensure their effective implementation and maximize positive impacts. Specifically, it aims to design and implement open, multi-modal information ecosystems involving diverse stakeholders and local traditional communities—particularly those in cross-border territories of East Africa and the Amazon region.
MOSAIC hypothesizes that these vulnerable populations can define feasible, acceptable, and sustainable adaptation/mitigation solutions to promote health and well-being, provided:
i) They have access to data, information, and knowledge enabling objective, comprehensive understanding of their living environment and its changes,
ii) They have access to knowledge about these changes’ impacts on their health/well-being, and
iii) They actively engage in data and knowledge production.
Key achievements to date include:
- Inventorying and engaging key local academic/non-academic stakeholders in environment, conservation, animal/human health, plus traditional representatives (Maasaï herders; Indigenous and Maroon Amazonian communities);
- Conducting a survey among Maasaï herders to understand their perceptions of animal-human-ecosystem health interactions;
- Cataloging multi-level public policies in study areas;
- Developing a meta-data model and cataloging existing project-area datasets;
- Initiating formalization of expert knowledge on cascading effects of environmental issues in study contexts, building models to update/produce indicators, simulate wild animal movement scenarios in Amboseli, and generate user-targeted explanations;
- Launching development of a data infrastructure to facilitate data discovery, access, visualization, and exploitation.
What do you think the Cluster can bring to your project?
- Identify scientific partners working on similar or related scientific issues and study sites, with a view to fostering future collaborations.
- Establish a representative and broad research community focused on planetary health issues, which can help achieve normative consensus on the validity of the project’s results—including Planetary Health-related conceptual frameworks, methods, and tools—thereby facilitating the widespread adoption of project outcomes by both academic and non-academic stakeholders.
- Enable actors from the Global South, who are partners in the project, to gain visibility and influence within the international Planetary Health agenda.
How do you see the cluster’s work supporting EU policy actions?
The Cluster, by bringing together a representative and broad research community working on planetary health issues, and through policy briefs and engagements with parliamentarians, should be able to provide sound scientific facts and knowledge that contribute to holding public authorities, including the EU, accountable for decision-making and the implementation of equitable actions promoting the creation of healthy environments on a global scale.
By contributing to the scientific literacy of various actors and facilitating their access to data and knowledge about environmental issues and their impacts on health and well-being, MOSAIC aims to build the capacity of a range of stakeholders, enabling them to propose adaptation and mitigation actions that can inform public policy.
Learn more about MOSAIC: https://www.mosaic-planetaryhealth.eu
