ISEE Europe Spring 2024 Newsletter
ISEE Young Rennes is coming soon! The ISEE Young 2024 will take place from 5–7 June in Rennes, France. This meeting offers an outstanding opportunity for researchers in environmental epidemiology to exchange ideas, foster scientific collaborations, meet new and old colleagues from the field, and of course, have a nice time! Our goal is to create a stimulating and accessible forum that enhances participation from all attendees, and where hopefully researchers from all around Europe feel welcome. This is why we are putting in place all resources possible to ensure an inclusive, sustainable, and lively in-person conference. We look forward to welcoming you to the pleasant and welcoming city of Rennes, where sunshine is more than just a rumor :) Registration is open until May 15, 2024, 23:59 CEST! How to register for ISEE Young Rennes 2024? In order to reduce costs and enable us to manage logistics as effectively as possible,registration for the ISEE Young will be in two steps: Step 1: Pre-registration Here you can fill in all your details and pre-register for the workshops on Wednesday June 5 and the conference. At the end of the pre-registration process you will receive a code by e-mail, allowing you to proceed to step 2. Click here to proceed to pre-registration Step 2: Registration & Payment This step is carried out on our website. You must enter the category and code you received by e-mail following your pre-registration. You will then be able to pay and finalize your registration! Thank you for following these two steps! ISEE Young Rennes 2024 is a conference organised by volunteer researchers. We don't use external service providers to help us with the organisation and we are incharge of everything ourselves. This is not our original job (although researchers are able to do everything!) so we will do our best to manage registrations as smoothly as possible. Given the number of abstracts submitted, it ispossible that many of you will register, so there may be a slight delay beforeyour final registration is confirmed. Please contact us directly at iseeyoung24@univ-rennes.fr, should you have any specific inquiries. Preliminary program is available here ISEE Young kicks off on June 5 with pre-conference workshops. They've been a victim of their own success and are all full at the moment, but we've set up a waiting list. The keynotes have also been revealed. There will be 5 presentations on particularly innovative and interesting topics in environmental epidemiology:
Other events will be revealed progressively, such as our not-so-early morning session (starting at 8am!) and our mysterious social event/conference dinner on Thursday 6... We'll be revealing our program progressively and in preview on our Twitter account @iseeyoungrennes, don't hesitate to follow us! |
ISEE Europe activities at the ISEE conference in Chile We are very much looking forward to a great ISEE conference in Santiago, Chile on August 25-28, 2024. Are you joining us either in-person or remotely? Make sure you don’t miss the following exciting ISEE Europe Chapter sessions, organized together with the main ISEE policy committee:
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EU Ambient Air Quality Directive update For some of you this might feel like an endless story, but here we are again with an update on the EU Ambient Air Quality Directive. As some might recall the European Commission presented its position of the recall of the EU Ambient Directive at the end of 2022. Since then, the two other parties, the European Council and the European Parliament, developed their positions. There was a vote on the European Parliament position in the Plenary of the European Parliament in September 2023 which passed. The European Council had its position ready at end of 2023 and the Trilogue between the parties commenced. After hard negotiations a common position between the three parties was agreed in early 2024. The compromised proposal is less ambitious than the European Parliament position and lacks a path to reach WHO alignment (click here for our commentary on this). It is, however, still much better than the current directive. The European Council voted in favor of the compromised agreement, and so did the Environmental committee of the European Parliament. On Wednesday 24 April, 2023, the European Parliament approved the final text on the proposed AAQD. Does this mean that the Directive is adopted? With the adoption of this provisional agreement, only a couple of procedural steps remain before the new AAQD becomes EU law. First, within a corrigendum procedure to adopt the text in all official languages, a vote in the Parliament is scheduled on 2 October 2024. With the Council needing all EU official language versions of the text to proceed with its final vote, this can only happen following the October Parliament vote. The text will then appear in the EU Official Journal. The compromised agreement of the AAQD is less ambitious than the European Parliament version. This is because the European Council version was very far from the European Parliament position. As an example, the Council version had a 10-year delay clause of reaching limit values in poorer areas. This would have been disastrous from an environmental justice perspective and ISEE members highlighted how many lives this delay would cost. In the compromised agreement the ten-year postponement is instead based on areas where heating with solid fuels drives the higher levels. In addition, it put stricter conditions on actions that need to be taken during that postponement. Postponement due to modelling was reduced from 10 in the Council proposal to 5 years in the compromise text. In conclusion, the new AAQD has much stricter limit values than the current directive, more information to the general population and proposes some possibilities for seeking compensation for damage caused by air pollution. It does not have a clear roadmap to WHO levels and has some flexibility for postponement. |
ISEE Europe Activities on Climate Change and Health ISEE Europe participated as an official Observer at COP28 in Dubai, which hosted the first ever Health Day at a COP meeting. In preparation for the COP, the ISEE Policy Committee, with input from the ISEE Europe Chapter, had updated and posted its Policy Brief and published a Commentary in Environmental Epidemiology. COP28 is now seen as a major achievement in bringing the topic of health into the climate negotiations, with a view to supporting faster and more ambitious decisions on climate change mitigation. Forthcoming important opportunities for ISEE to contribute our scientific expertise are through the WHO's ATACH Committee and in support of a proposed resolution on climate and health at the WHO's World Health Assembly in May. ISEE Europe also plans to actively participate in the Subsidiary Bodies SB60 meeting in Bonn in June in preparation for the next COP29 meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan in December. ERS and ISEE announce new partnership The European Respiratory Society (ERS) and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) have teamed up to encourage collaboration between members of each organisation on respiratory and environmental health research, education and advocacy. Joint members of ERS and ISEE can now access discounted membership fees. The partnership aims to engage joint members in research and advocacy topics which are central to improving respiratory and environmental health, facilitating mutual participation in educational activities. To learn more about the partnership visit the ERS website via this link. To understand how being an ERS member can grant you access to ISEE membership at a 15% discounted rate, please visit the ISEE website for more information. |