/Global solutions to climate change (#EEF2019Lisbon overview)
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Global solutions to climate change (#EEF2019Lisbon overview)

As most of you know me personally, or have been to this blog before would know, I am a passionate science communicator! I care about everything science and scicomm. Which is why, I’ve been working almost full time on this, together with various projects. Being involved in the Science Communication Journal Club team, gave me the opportunity to attend the Ecology across borders congress in Lisbon, Portugal. Here are some highlight from the event, now that I’ve done my own contribution and the programme is half-way through completion.

Congress Logo

A big Congress for "small" topics

Ecology is a science, encompassing many many aspects of our and other life-forms’ existence in this world. It does (although many of us don’t account for this) our lives in so many different ways. However, ecology is somewhere far behind the interest levels towards health, food, technology and even space sciences, while it probably affects us and those sciences more than we’d recognize on a daily basis. 
While the awareness of climate, its extreme expressions, species extinction and geological changes has undoubtedly increased in the last decades (to no small part thanks to climate change debates), there is still little understanding from most of us about our role in all these phenomena both as their causes and in suffering from their consequences.

The big, the small, the microscopic and the giant

The Congress has super rich programme when it comes to the life- and geological aspects of ecology and climate. There are key notes and whole parallel sessions highlighting problems and more importantly potential in fungi, microbes, insects, birds, big and small vertebrates and humans, plants, mosses, their communities, interactions, and development. But also, soil, marine, micro- and macro-climatic events which influence our life and how we can (potentially) deal with and mitigate climate change and extreme weather events in the future).

The social aspects of climate science

Somewhat more interesting for me were the talks with social point of view – education,  humanitarian, art, outreach and of course – science communication sessions, aiming to educate, inform and equip the hard-core-scientists with the right tools to make their messages heard by the right people who need to heard them.

The best things so far (half way through the Congress)

Three things so far are my absolute favorite about this Congress, I’ll call them swag factors:

The Congress continues for two more days. Stay tuned for updates on this post itself!