During the first week of August, the Global Health Resilience team (GHR) from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) had the pleasure to receive a visit from the Brazilian Climate and Health Observatory, an initiative by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ).

The Brazilian Observatory of Climate and Health studies the intersection of climate change and public health in Brazil, exploring how environmental factors, such as temperature and weather patterns, impact public health outcomes. Their work includes monitoring and predicting climate-related health risks, advocating for informed policy decisions, and fostering collaboration among scientists, healthcare professionals, and policymakers to mitigate the effects of climate change on public health in Brazil.

First and foremost, this meeting was a valuable opportunity to expand all of our ongoing collaborations in person, a very welcomed change from the usual online interactions. Hence, the first day was primarily devoted to the presentation of already existing working groups: Raquel Lana introduced a questionnaire to improve the handling of health data definitions across the countries, Rapheal Saldanha showcased the R packages developed to harmonize and visualize various types of Brazilian data (i.e. climate, health and population), and Diego Xavier provided an update about the employed methodology for drone flights.

The second day started with an interactive workshop prepared by Antonia Frangeskou and Diana Urquiza to present and receive feedback about HARMONIZE’s online presence. The workshop consisted of two parts. Initially, the participants had the opportunity to explore a low-fidelity prototype of the webportal. Following this, the participants were split into smaller groups and had to propose an optimal distribution of all necessary elements between the website and the webportal.

Later that day, the teams split into working groups, each focusing on a specific topic, including: health data training, climate package, spatial aggregation, data audit and indicator suggestions. These discussions in smaller groups helped to identify the challenges that are being faced and facilitated finding solutions for them. Finally, each working group  defined the next development steps.

On the third and last day, all working groups came back together to present their results. All in all, this research visit played a beneficial role in solidifying ongoing developments and determining the direction for the development in the coming months.

Participants of the GHR-FIOCRUZ research visit

Interactive workshop on the HARMONIZE webportal