Five million euros to study disease risk associated with the degradation of urban riverine ecosystems

_{English version: Diana Taborda}

A team from the University of Coimbra (UC) leads a consortium that has just been granted funding of five million euros from the European programme "Horizon Europe", to study the relationship between human health and the health of aquatic ecosystems in urban contexts.

The funding received is allocated to the research project "OneAquaHealth - Protecting urban aquatic ecosystems to promote One Health". The consortium brings together 13 partners from 10 countries: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, Greece and Israel, and will study the link between the health of urban aquatic ecosystems and human health, over the next four years.

The consortium leader, Maria João Feio, a researcher at the Centre for Marine and Environmental Sciences (MARE) of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC), explains that the project's goal is to “show that the health of freshwater ecosystems and human health and well-being in urban contexts are strongly interconnected, and that the improvement of one, results in the improvement of the other”.

To achieve this, OneAquaHealth aims to "select the best indicators that can assess this balance and the disease risk associated with the degradation of urban riverine ecosystems and their fauna and flora", highlights the FCTUC researcher, adding that the project also aims to "provide tools to establish the most appropriate and timely decisions based on early warnings and the best ways to manage urban aquatic ecosystems in the context of global health in cities and climate change".

This is an interdisciplinary consortium, bringing together companies, universities and research centres in the areas of ecology, human health, veterinary, social sciences, communication, information technology and arts. In Portugal, the partner company is SHINE2Europe.