Researchers evaluate accuracy of online health news using easily accessible AI

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

DURHAM, N.H.—It can be challenging to gauge the quality of online news—questioning if it is real or if it is fake. When it comes to health news and press releases about medical treatments and procedures the issue can be even more complex, especially if the story is not complete and still doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of fake news. To help identify the stories with inflated claims, inaccuracies and possible associated risks, researchers at the University of New Hampshire developed a new machine learning model, an application of artificial intelligence, that news services, like social media outlets, could easily use to better screen medical news stories for accuracy.

“The way most people think about fake news is something that's completely fabricated, but, especially in healthcare, it doesn't need to be fake. It could be that maybe they're not mentioning something,” said Ermira Zifla, assistant professors of decision sciences at UNH’s Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics. “In the study, we’re not making claims about the intent of the news organizations that put these out. But if things are left out, there should be a way to look at that.” 

Zifla and study co-author Burcu Eke Rubini, assistant professors of decision sciences, found in their research, published in Decision Support Systems, that since most people don’t have the medical expertise to understand the complexities of the news, the machine learning models they developed outperformed the evaluations of laypeople in assessing the quality of health stories. They used data from Health News Review that included news stories and press releases on new healthcare treatments published in various outlets from 2013 to 2018. The articles had already been evaluated by a panel of healthcare experts—medical doctors, healthcare journalists and clinical professors—using ten different evaluation criteria the experts had developed. The criteria included cost and benefits of the treatment or test, any possible harm, the quality of arguments, the novelty and availability of the procedure and the independence of the sources. The researchers then developed an algorithm based on the same expert criteria, and trained the machine models to classify each aspect of the  news story, matching that criteria as "satisfactory" or "not satisfactory".

The model's performance was then compared against layperson evaluations obtained through a separate survey where participants rated the same articles as "satisfactory" or "not satisfactory" based on the same criteria. The survey revealed an "optimism bias," with most of the 254 participants rating articles as satisfactory, markedly different from the model's more critical assessments.

Researchers stress that they are by no means looking to replace expert opinion but are hoping to start a conversation about evaluating news based on multiple criteria and offering an easily accessible and low-cost alternative via open-source software to better evaluate health news.

The University of New Hampshire inspires innovation and transforms lives in our state, nation and world. More than 16,000 students from 49 states and 82 countries engage with an award-winning faculty in top-ranked programs in business, engineering, law, health and human services, liberal arts and the sciences across more than 200 programs of study. A Carnegie Classification R1 institution, UNH partners with NASA, NOAA, NSF, and NIH, and received over $210 million in competitive external funding in FY23 to further explore and define the frontiers of land, sea and space.

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JOURNAL

Decision Support Systems

ARTICLE TITLE

Multi-criteria evaluation of health news stories

AI can speed design of health software

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NYU LANGONE HEALTH / NYU GROSSMAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Artificial intelligence helped clinicians to accelerate the design of diabetes prevention software, a new study finds.

Publishing online March 6 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the study examined the capabilities of a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called generative AI or GenAI, which predicts likely options for the next word in any sentence based on how billions of people used words in context on the internet. A side effect of this next-word prediction is that the generative AI “chatbots” like chatGPT can generate replies to questions in realistic language, and produce clear summaries of complex texts.

Led by researchers at NYU Langone Health, the current paper explores the application of ChatGPT to the design of a software program that uses text messages to counter diabetes by encouraging patients to eat healthier and get exercise. The team tested whether AI-enabled interchanges between doctors and software engineers could hasten the development of such a personalized automatic messaging system (PAMS).

In the current study, eleven evaluators in fields ranging from medicine to computer science successfully used ChatGPT to produce a version of the diabetes tool over 40 hours, where an original, non-AI-enabled effort had required more than 200 programmer hours.

“We found that ChatGPT improves communications between technical and non-technical team members to hasten the design of computational solutions to medical problems,” says study corresponding author Danissa Rodriguez, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone, and member of its Healthcare Innovation Bridging Research, Informatics and Design (HiBRID) Lab. “The chatbot drove rapid progress throughout the software development life cycle, from capturing original ideas, to deciding which features to include, to generating the computer code. If this proves to be effective at scale it could revolutionize healthcare software design.”

AI as Translator

Generative AI tools are sensitive, say the study authors, and asking a question of the tool in two subtly different ways may yield divergent answers. The skill required to frame the questions asked of chatbots in a way that elicits the desired response, called prompt engineering, combines intuition and experimentation. Physicians and nurses, with their understanding of nuanced medical contexts, are well positioned to engineer strategic prompts that improve communications with engineers, and without learning to write computer code. 

These design efforts, however, where care providers, the would-be users of a new software, seek to advise engineers about what it must include can be compromised by attempts to converse using “different” technical languages. In the current study, the clinical members of the team were able to type their ideas in plain English, enter them into chatGPT, and ask the tool to convert their input into the kind of language required to guide coding work by the team’s software engineers. AI could take software design only so far before human software developers were needed for final code generation, but the overall process was greatly accelerated, say the authors. 

“Our study found that chatGPT can democratize the design of healthcare software by enabling doctors and nurses to drive its creation,” says senior study author Devin Mann, MD, director of the HiBRID Lab, and strategic director of Digital Health Innovation within NYU Langone Medical Center Information Technology (MCIT). “GenAI-assisted development promises to deliver computational tools that are usable, reliable, and in-line with the highest coding standards.”

Along with Rodriguez and Mann, study authors from the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone were Katharine Lawrence, MD, Beatrix Brandfield-Harvey, Lynn Xu, Sumaiya Tasneem, and Defne Levine. Javier Gonzalez, technical lead in the HIBRID Lab, was also a study author. This work was supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases grant 1R18DK118545-01A1.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Medical Internet Research

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Leveraging Generative AI Tools to Support the Development of Digital Solutions in Health Care Research: Case Study

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Mar-2024

 

Global warming is affecting bats’ hibernation

Adapting to milder and shorter winters

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

 

IMAGE: 

THE STUDY LED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA REVEALS HOW BATS ARE ADAPTING TO A WARMER CLIMATE AND MILDER TEMPERATURES WITH CHANGES IN THE LENGTH OF THEIR HIBERNATION, THE BODY CONDITIONS AND THEIR MIGRATION PATERNS.

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CREDIT: MARC LÓPEZ-ROIG, UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

Global change is altering the physiology of the hibernation and behaviour of bats, according to a study led by the University of Barcelona, carried out for twenty years. Given the milder winters we are having, bats are accumulating less fat reserves in autumn, they shorten their hibernation periods and they leave their winter shelter sooner. These changes could alter the migration pattern of bats and the phenology of their seasonal displacements. The study has been conducted on the largest colony of bats in Catalonia, in the Natural Park of Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac (Spain). It is formed by 17,000 common bent-wing bats (Miniopterus schreibersii), a migratory species that lives in big colonies, especially in winter.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, is signed by the experts Marc López-Roig and Jordi Serra-Cobo, from the Universtiy of Barcelona’s Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio), and Eduard Piera, from the Government of Catalonia.

Adapting to milder and shorter winters

It seems bats are adapting to a warmer climate, with milder and shorter winters. In temperate latitudes, bats accumulate large amounts of fat reserves during autumn to face the hibernation period, which usually runs from mid-December to late-February.

“The fat reserves they accumulate should be large enough to survive the whole winter without eating. However, due to shorter winters and higher temperatures, bats are not fattening up in autumn as they used to do years ago, because they do not need that much fat to get through the winter”, notes Professor Jordi Serra-Cobo, from the UB’s Department of Evolutionary, Ecology and Environmental Sciences.

These changes in the body mass are clear in both sexes, although female bats show a lower body condition than males, both at the beginning and at the end of hibernation and during the activity period (March). “This fact could have an effect on the reproduction of the species, since a poor body condition in females could negatively affect gestation and lactation. However, in our latitudes, female bats have enough time between the end of hibernation and the beginning of reproduction to recover their weight and have an optimal body condition for hibernation”, says Marc López-Roig.

Hibernating in warmer caves

Global change is also affecting the bats’ arrangement in their winter shelter. “The colony of bats was usually located in the deeper chamber —continues the expert —, located sixty-five meters deep, with a relatively constant temperature — around 7ºC — during the months of December and January”.

“The study states that the hibernation chamber takes longer to cool down compared to previous years. This delay affects bat hibernation because they do not find the optimal temperatures to hibernate until late January or early February. Therefore, these animals look for colder spaces near the entrance of their winter shelter and are exposed to a higher risk of predation (for instance, by genets)”, concludes Marc López-Roig (UB-IRBio).

Changing migration routes

With a shorter hibernation, bats start their activity earlier (compared to other years): they start their migration route and they reach their spring destination sooner. If there is any cold wave once the spring arrives, bats may not be ready to face low-temperature periods. These changes could have consequences in the conservation and management of the species. “The migratory routes and the seasonal movements of bats are well-documented in Catalonia. Recently, many new places in these routes have been found, but other important shelters have been lost or altered”, notes Serra-Cobo.

For instance, the increase in temperatures prevented bats from hibernating in the provinces of Tarragona. The loss of this shelter as a hibernation place altered the migration of this species and it also altered some migration routes in the south of Catalonia.

How will it affect pest control in the environment?

Global change could also alter the ecological function of chiropterans, which are decisive for the pest control of insects and disease-vector species in the environment. How might these changes affect their preys’ life cycle?

“Everything indicates that the phenology of certain insect species has also advanced with the global warming. This would coincide with the end of bat hibernation, so the impact of a shorter hibernation would be lower if these two situations were synchronized”, note the authors of the study.

All chiropteran species could be affected by the climate change, but the magnitude of the impact could be very different among groups of bats with different biogeographical patterns. “Mediterranean species, adapted to climate conditions with higher temperatures, may be less vulnerable to climate warming compared to species from northern or boreal latitudes,” says the team.
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The expert Marc López-Roig during field work.

Professor Jordi Serra-Cobo is an expert in ecoepidemiological studies.

CREDIT

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-024-52459-9 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Thinner bats to face hibernation as response to climate warming

 

Communities of color across the US suffer a growing burden from polluted air

Study finds minoritized communities endure nearly 8 times higher rates of pediatric asthma and 1.3 times higher risk of dying prematurely from exposure to pollutants

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

THE GRAPHIC SHOWS NEW CASES OF PEDIATRIC ASTHMA LINKED TO NITROGEN DIOXIDE AIR POLLUTION IN THE DC AND BALTIMORE REGION. THE DARK BROWN AREAS INDICATE THE HIGHEST NUMBER OF NEW CASES, WHICH THE STUDY LINKED TO NEIGHBORHOODS WITH A LARGER PROPORTION OF MARGINALIZED RESIDENTS.

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CREDIT: GAIGE KERR/THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

WASHINGTON (March 6, 2024)--Despite progress toward cleaner air in the US, a new study suggests that communities of color across the nation are shouldering a growing burden of diseases linked to air pollution. A paper published today by researchers at the George Washington University suggests that racial and ethnic disparities in cases of pollutant-linked diseases like asthma increased during the last decade.

 

“Redlining and systemic racism have resulted in the least white areas of the US being located near factories, congested roadways or shipping routes with heavily polluted air,” says Gaige Kerr, a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health. “This study highlights the need for place-based policies that allocate resources and target action into historically-overburdened communities in the United States.”

 

Kerr and his colleagues quantified census tract-level variations in health outcomes attributable to two forms of damaging pollutants–nitrogen dioxide, which typically comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles in urban areas, and fine particulate matter, commonly called soot. They pulled demographic data from the US Census Bureau and looked at novel datasets that incorporate NASA satellite data to estimate pollution concentrations and how concentrations and associated health impacts differed depending on the location.

 

The researchers found:

 

• Racial and ethnic disparities in the health impacts associated with nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter widened during the last decade.
• The relative disparity in premature deaths caused by exposure to fine particulate matter between the least and most white communities of the US increased by 16% and between the least and most Hispanic communities by 40% during the last decade. 
• The relative disparity in pediatric asthma caused by exposure to nitrogen dioxide across different racial groups grew by 19% in the US during the last ten years.
• Overall, an estimated 49,400 premature deaths and nearly 115,000 new cases of pediatric asthma were linked to fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, respectively, in the United States in 2019.
• Communities of color in the United States experienced 7.5 times higher pediatric asthma rates and 1.3 times higher premature mortality rates due to these pollutants compared with most white communities.

 

People living in neighborhoods ringed by factories or next to highways can be exposed to high levels of both nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter. Nitrogen dioxide is a pollutant that can irritate the lungs and can trigger asthma attacks. Evidence suggests that for children, exposure to the traffic-related air pollution mixture, for which nitrogen dioxide is a marker, can actually cause asthma, a lifelong condition that can be life threatening. 

 

Fine particulate matter can lodge deep in the lungs and get into the bloodstream. Fine particulate matter has been linked to a number of diseases including heart disease, lung cancer and stroke.

 

“This research shows that the health disparities from exposure to these pollutants are larger than disparities in the exposures themselves, and that the disparities widened over the last decade even as pollution levels fell,” said Susan Anenberg, co-author of the research and director of the GW Climate and Health Institute at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. “As the US presidential election starts to gear up, this study also demonstrates the importance of continued strong regulations to protect air quality and people’s health.”

 

The study found the estimated monetary value attributed to mortality risk for premature death due to particulate matter as well as the direct costs of pediatric asthma due to nitrogen dioxide in 2019 amounted to $466 billion or roughly 2.2% of the US gross domestic product. 

 

“The study also shows that the Environmental Protection Agency air quality standards are not adequately protecting Americans, especially the most marginalized communities,” Kerr said. “The adverse health effects linked to fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide pollution in our study occurred even though EPA air quality standards were largely met,” He added that the EPA recently strengthened fine particulate matter standards, a step that will help provide protection from this health-harming pollutant.

 

The study, Increasing racial and ethnic disparities in ambient air pollution–attributable morbidity and mortality in the United States, was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives on March 6, 2024. NASA funded the research.

 

Watch a video of GW researcher Gaige Kerr talking about the study.

 

-GW-

 

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JOURNAL

Environmental Health Perspectives

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Increasing racial and ethnic disparities in ambient air pollution–attributable morbidity and mortality in the United States

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Mar-2024

 MINORITY COMMUNITIES FACE GREATEST IMPACT

Study: Sinking land increases risk for thousands of coastal residents by 2050

One in fifty people living in two dozen coastal cities in the United States could experience significant flooding by 2050, according to Virginia Tech-led research

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA TECH

 

IMAGE: 

LEONARD OHENHEN

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CREDIT: PHOTO BY CHRISTINA FRANUSICH FOR VIRGINIA TECH.

One in 50 people living in two dozen coastal cities in the United States could experience significant flooding by 2050, according to Virginia Tech-led research.

Published in Nature, the study combines satellite-obtained measurements of sinking land, also known as subsidence, with sea-level rise projections and tide charts to provide a new comprehensive look at the potential for flooding in a combined 32 cities along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts. The study projects that in the next three decades as many as 500,000 people could be affected as well as a potential 1 in 35 privately owned properties damaged by flooding. The study also highlights the racial and socioeconomic demographics of those potentially affected.

“One of the challenges we have with communicating the issue of sea-level rise and land subsidence broadly is it often seems like a long-term problem, like something whose impacts will only manifest at the end of the century, which many people may not care about,” said lead author Leonard Ohenhen, a graduate student working with Associate Professor Manoochehr Shirzaei at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab. “What we’ve done here is focused the picture on the short term, just 26 years from now.”

Other increases compared to current estimates include:

• Between 500 and 700 more square miles of land flooded
• 176,000 to 518,000 more people affected
• 94,000 to 288,000 more properties exposed with an estimated value of $32 billion to $109 billion

“The whole purpose of this paper is to provide data to support decisions,” Shirzaei said. “Every city, every county has a flood resiliency plan in place. They are required by law to create that. But it’s likely nobody has received the entire picture until this study, which creates probably the first comprehensive picture of what’s happen in the not-too-distant future.”

Collaborators on the study include:

• Chandrakanta Ojha of the India Institute of Science Education and Research in Punjab, India
• Sonam Sherpa, a former Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech and a postdoctoral scholar at Brown University
• Robert J. Nicholls of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

“This study demonstrates that we can now measure vertical land motion at a sufficient scale to create a useful climate service that supports planning and management decisions on flooding," said Nicholls, a professor of climate adaptation. "This approach has the potential to be applied in any city around the world, really supporting adaptation.”

Using highly accurate data points measured by space-based radar satellites, Shirzaei and his research team have built some of the world's first high-resolution depictions of the sinking land along the coast of the entire United States. Their work has previously revealed regions of the Atlantic coast to be sinking by as much as 5 millimeters per year.

This study revealed that 24 of the 32 coastal cities are currently sinking more than 2 millimeters per year and half of those cities have areas sinking more than global seas are rising. These numbers might seem small, but when combined with sea-level rise over time, it adds up to quite a significant shift, according to Ohenhen.

“The analogy I have found that is really helpful in helping people understand this change is to think about a sinking boat,” he said. “Imagine you are in that boat with a steady leak, slowly causing the boat to sink. That leak symbolizes sea-level rise or broadly flooding. What would happen if it also starts raining? Even a minor rainfall or drizzle would cause the boat to sink more quickly than you thought it would. That’s what land subsidence does — even imperceptible millimeter land subsidence exacerbates existing coastal hazards.”

Along with the new flood projections, the study also revealed the 32 cities have a combined 131 flood control structures, such as levees, berms, or dikes, but that 50 percent of those are located on the California coast. Only three of the 11 Atlantic coast cities studied maintain levees or floodwalls.

“When we looked at it across the board, we found that there is a general unappreciation for flood protection, particularly on the Atlantic coast,” Ohenhen said. “And even the levees there often protect less than 10 percent of the city, compared to other cities on the Pacific or Gulf coasts where up to 70 percent is protected.”

Another first in the study is the consideration of racial and socioeconomic demographics related to the potentially affected areas.

In some cities examined, particularly those along the Gulf Coast, the potential increased exposure fell disproportionately on racial minorities. In other cities, the properties facing increased exposure were found to generally be of lesser value than the median property value of the area. And in a few cities, New Orleans and Port Arthur, Texas, particularly, these two demographics intersect, showing the areas with greatest potential risk to be disproportionately occupied by people of color who are also at an economic disadvantage when compared to the city as a whole.

“That was the most surprising part of the study,” Ohenhen said. “We found that there is racial and economic inequality in those areas in that there was an overrepresentation of historically marginalized groups potentially impacted as well as properties with significantly lower value than the rest of the cities. It really multiplies the potential impact to those areas and their abilities to recover from significant flooding.”

Shirzaei said he believes the study as a whole not only provides the clearest picture of potential flooding to date, but also should serve as a call to action for policymakers of those areas.

“Very often, we hear, ‘Oh, we didn’t know about land subsidence’ or, ‘We didn’t know about that other factor,’ but this study will take away those excuses from everybody,” Shirzaei said.

The study provides a new comprehensive look at the flood risks for 32 cities on three coasts by 2050.

CREDIT

Image courtesy of Leonard Ohenhen.

Manoochehr Shirzaei

CREDIT

Virginia Tech

JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-024-07038-3 

ARTICLE TITLE

Disappearing cities on US coasts

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Mar-2024

 

The international scientific community to debate the dichotomy between economic growth and the fight against the climate crisis

Meeting Announcement

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

ICTA-UAB Growth vs Climate Conference 2024 

13-15 March 2024

Hotel EXE Campus- Campus Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Cerdanyola del Vallès. Barcelona, Spain. 

 

Human activity is irreversibly changing our planet, especially the climate. The voracious demand for fossil fuels and natural resources has led us to an ecological breaking point, even after decades of climate action.

With the aim of addressing the most pressing environmental problems of our time, the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) is organising the "Growth vs Climate Conference 2024" from 13-15 March 2024. The event will gather leading scientists, thinkers, policymakers, activists and journalists at the UAB campus in Cerdanyola del Vallès.  

Around 400 international researchers from diverse disciplines will discuss different perspectives on growth in the fight against climate change, as a path for reversing the climate crisis. Will green growth, the bioeconomy or the Green New Deal be enough to avert a climate disaster, or should we look to degrowth or agrowth as alternative models? What are the tradeoffs associated with different mitigation strategies and how can we avoid rebound effects and negative social impacts?

The 3-day event will feature keynote speakers and presentations on scientific results on specific and cross-cutting themes, policy debates and co-creation workshops organized across five societal challenges: Oceans, Land, Cities, Consumption and Policies.  Participants are challenged to rethink how we manage our oceans, forests, cities, consumption patterns and economic systems in order to ensure a secure future.  

Keynote speakers include ecofeminist Yayo Herrero; Third Vice-President of the Government and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera; Secretary of State for Social Rights, Rosa Martínez Rodríguez; Secretary of State for Climate Action of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Anna Barnadas; economic anthropologist and ICTA-UAB researcher Jason Hickel, as well as the ecological economist of ICTA-UAB and Holberg Prize 2023, Joan Martínez Alier, among others. The illustrator Javier Royo will lead a live graphic recording of the event’s big ideas.

After 3 days of debates, the closing event will feature a talk by environmental activist Olivia Mandle, a performance by poetry slammer Adriana Bertran, and the UAB's colla castellera Ganàpies.  

 

Inaugural Session

Wednesday March 13th 2024
Time: 15h - Venue: Exe Campus Hotel - UAB – Campus de la UAB

Keynote: “Transición ecosocial justa. Aterrizar en un planeta translimitado”

• Yayo Herrero, anthropologist, ecofeminist and engineer.

Inaugural debate

Moderated by Jason Hickel, ICTA-UAB anthropologist.

• Teresa Ribera, Third Vice-President of the Government and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge.
• Rosa Martínez Rodríguez, Secretary of State for Social Rights, Spanish Government.
• Anna Barnadas, Secretary of Climate Action, Generalitat de Catalunya.
• Victoria Reyes- García, anthropologist, ICREA Professor at ICTA-UAB.
• Jeroen van den Bergh, environmental economist, ICREA Professor at ICTA-UAB.
• Joan Martínez Alier, ecological economist at ICTA-UAB, Holberg Prize 2023.

Live graphic recording of debate by illustrator Javier Royo.
 

Closing ceremony

Friday, March 15th 2024
Time: 18 h - Venue: Exe Campus Hotel - UAB – Campus  UAB
 

• Talk by environmental activist Olivia Mandle.
• Poetry slam by Adriana Bertrán.
• Performance by Colla castellera UAB, els Ganàpies.

Program: https://www.growthvsclimate2024.org/

 

Fighting the climate emergency: SACRU Universities united for planetary health

The paper Laudato Si' and the emerging contribution of Catholic research universities to planetary health, a collaborative effort of academics from the SACRU network, has been published in Lancet Planetary Health

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITA CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE

Research in the footsteps of Laudato Si and the integral ecology of Pope Francis is one of the main areas driving the action of the Strategic Alliance of Catholic Research Universities (SACRU), an international network of Catholic universities. The experts of the Working Group Catholic Identity and Laudato Si', The Common Home and Social Justice confirmed this commitment by publishing the paper Laudato Si' and the emerging contribution of Catholic research universities to planetary health in The Lancet Planetary Health, a prestigious scientific journal.

Among the authors is Paolo Gomarasca, Full Professor of Moral Philosophy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore: «Human exploitation of resources worsens climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Pope Francis, in ‘Laudato Si', advocates integrated solutions, emphasizing social justice and renewable energy. Catholic universities, like those in the SACRU network, promote interdisciplinary research and education, fostering sustainable solutions and planetary stewardship. Through collaboration with organizations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, they translate science into equitable policies, addressing global challenges effectively».

The paper points out that the main threats to the health of the planet - climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity - fall disproportionately on minorities and marginalized communities, who pay the heaviest price in terms of diseases and premature deaths. While technical solutions to planetary threats are often effective, as seen in the sharp declines in the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbon resulting from the Montreal Protocol, researchers point out that these are insufficient policies to prevent hazards yet to come.

The paper refers to Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si, published in 2015, in which the Holy Father, recognizing that human activity is the primary driver of climate change, urges the adoption of long-term solutions that can 'restore dignity to marginalized people.' To implement the Holy Father's vision in 2021, the Laudato Si Platform was launched to catalyze the cultural shift from exploiting the planet to protecting the common home for the well-being of all.

At the higher education level, this goal is expressed in the international and multidisciplinary collaboration between Catholic universities, of which SACRU is a virtuous example. The network is active in teaching, research, and service to society with the aim of putting scientific activities at the disposal of the common good. An example of this mission is embodied in the collaboration initiated by SACRU with FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The bilateral agreement aims to tackle food and health inequalities on the planet, with special attention paid to developing countries.

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JOURNAL

The Lancet Planetary Health

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Commentary/editorial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The paper Laudato Si' and the emerging contribution of Catholic research universities to planetary health