On day one, attendees were re-acquainted with one another as well as welcoming new faces through a series of introductions and ice-breaker activities. The group were then familiarised with all technical developments that have been conducted over the last two years, including an overview of the data audit which seeks to gather multiple sources of epidemiological, climatic, socioeconomic and environmental data to be made available as a public resource. Following this, participants were given live demonstrations of four dashboards under development. This included climate and health dashboards for decision-makers in Iquitos, Peru and the Dominican Republic, a generalisable dashboard that can be employed elsewhere, and the HARMONIZE Explorer which is a subset of the Brazil Data Cube. For the last session, attendees engaged in hands-on tutorials for prototype data harmonisation tools developed for the project, encompassing health data training and manipulation, climate data downscaling, exploration of socioeconomic data, and a data processing lab for computationally expensive tasks. The day concluded with a walk through the city to celebrate the Festival of Sant Jordi (St George’s Day).

Day two commenced with a presentation on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Readable) data practices and storage to ensure all tools and data created for HARMONIZE will meet this standard. After this was the main event of the day, the hackathon, which facilitated cross-country development and integration of the different tools. During the hackathon, participants were split into four groups to focus on four key tools centred around: 1) health data training, 2) climate data downscaling, 3) socioeconomic data processing, and 4) HARMONIZE Explorer. Teams were given several hours to establish key features to improve the tools, propose an integration pipeline to unify tools into a single workflow, and present their work to the rest of the consortium. The hackathon concluded with a plenary session to agree a common workflow and development plan for the next 12 months. This suite includes a tool for manipulating health data aimed at non-programmers (data4health), a downscaling and bias correction tool for climate data (clim4health), a tool for accessing and processing socioeconomic data (socio4health), an environmental data tool for land use and land cover (land4health), and a tool for handling drone data for health and environmental research (drone4health). The final session of the day focused on creating a publication and dissemination plan for all ongoing work across the consortium.

During the morning of day three, participants attended an interactive workshop to co-design the HARMONIZE web portal, which will make all of the tools developed under the project available to users. In the afternoon, the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) hosted an online stakeholder consultation workshop, inviting representatives from international organisations, humanitarian agencies, national ministries of health, meteorological services and local communities to join. The 90-minute workshop sought interactive feedback from participants to gather input on progress toward digital tool development so far. Six tools were presented in total: 1) data4health, 2) clim4health, 3) socio4health, 4) Iquitos data dashboard, 5) HARMONIZE Explorer, and 6) ENDCast early warning tool which uses harmonised data to forecast infectious disease risk across Latin America and the Caribbean. A total of 29 stakeholders attended, giving tailored feedback and highlighting key gaps in the individual tools and overall workflow. The annual meeting concluded with a plenary and discussion on next steps following this consultation workshop. The main focus over the next 12 months will be to finalise the ‘4health’ toolkit and develop a worked example for each country that combines all of the tools into a single pipeline. In addition, further field campaigns and community engagement will be carried out as planned along with in-person training courses in both Brazil (2025) and Peru (2026).

Many participants from the Annual Meeting 2024 also attended the Drone Ethics Round Table on Friday 26th April. The aim of the workshop was to share preliminary findings from the scoping review conducted by the HARMONIZE team on the ethical use of drones in environment and health research, and facilitate discussion between drone and ethics experts on experiences of conducting drone campaigns within local communities. Please stay tuned for more information about the workshop and round table in a subsequent news article!.