 I would like to welcome you to the great debate which will cover an interesting topic today. So we'll speak about the role of scientific information in emerging environmental crisis. The reason we wanted to look at this topic is that we notice that every day we have to take quite a lot of decisions which are related to our well-being, which are related to our life, which are related to our property. In oftentimes we see that we as a scientific community are under severe stress when we have to provide a scientific information, robust scientific information in the cases where those decisions related to our lives and property have to be taken by the authorities. And this is the most often question which we as a scientific community are asked when it comes to disaster management. And there are multiple tools and there are observational data and forecasting in the warning system which exists in this area. And some of the warning system have quite a long history, but there are some events which you can forecast to a certain extent, which you can't forecast. And the situation becomes even more complicated when the forecasting and when the data to take decisions are not there. And we've been in the situation in the case of our COVID pandemic when they think was new and we don't know how it works, but it doesn't apply only to pandemic. There are multiple areas of our life where we have to take decisions based on the uncertain or limited scientific information. There is some known knowns, there are some unknown, and there are some unknown unknowns, which we even don't, which we can't even estimate what it is. As a scientific community are asked to provide decision under very, very hard time constraints and under very difficult circumstances. So the point of this debate is actually to try and understand what is the role of scientific community, when we have to provide information, and then such information is limited, or when we have the uncertainty, or when there is a public crisis. So what can we do? How do we manage this uncertainty? How do we manage the expectations of the policy makers? And I would like to introduce our outstanding panel, which is with us today. We are still missing our first panelist, Ms. Vasity Sokho. We hope that she will connect to us as soon as possible. And I just wanted to tell that Vasity is a director of natural disaster management office in Fiji. She has an industry experience which spans 15 years on the high technical field of geospatial science and surveying. She has assisted a number of significant projects, while working for Fijian government, including development of disaster integrated system, prior to taking the current role. She has also worked as a, across the regional projects in Nauru, Federation of Micronesia, Palau, Tuvalu, Marshall Island, Kiribati in Australia. And Vasity did her master in RMIT in Melbourne in Australia, and her research focuses on the impact of the Fiji new tattoo on which she updated and transformed the parameter for Fiji maritime boundaries. She is the first female director of Fiji's national office for disaster management, and she's very familiar with the challenges of the work in the male dominated profession, like hers. And as a result, she has developed and acute interest to put those norms where the gender equality comes first are into the norm in the office. She's passionate to change the stereotype centered particularly around gender roles in the water Pacific community. And since taking her role as a director, she made some significant achievements with a cultural relocation of some communities due to sea level rise and establishment of Fiji community disaster management training manual. Fiji become first country in the world to validate the target E of the sender framework. She reviewed the National Disaster Management Act and impacted the renovation of the disaster management office. She is a chair or co chair of the Pacific technical working group on human ability. She's a deputy chair chair of Asia Pacific technical working group on disaster related statistics. And she is a co chair of the Pacific response to disaster displacement advisory board, and she champions the causes of inclusivity on a first female director of these office. I hope that she manages to connect to us. Oh, she is here. Hello, I see. I just introduced you. It's very nice to see you with us. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining. So then I would introduce our next panelist. So, our next panelist is the doctor make you work from Met Office UK. Dr. What is the head of atmospheric dispersion and your quality research group at Met Office UK. And in his role he led and coordinated met office research into the emissions transport and fate of hazardous gas and I result contaminants with a focus on atmospheric science to emergency responses societal, industrial and environmental impacts. Dr. What are has worked at the Met Office for 22 years during which time he has conducted and led the team in research and atmospheric dispersion and composition modeling, ranging from animal disease virus and vector based Fred such a food and gluten to your quality and volcanic eruptions. Dr. What has provided input to the UK government governmental advice scientific advisory group on emergencies. UK preparedness and planning activities including national exercises, and the UK national risk assessment process for a range of natural and volcanic disasters, and he has, and continues to serve on a number of national and international bodies, such as for both meteorological organization international civil aviation organization United Nations scientific community on the effects of atomic radiation and UK government review bodies. He has an extensive experience in bringing cross disciplinary side, and as part of the ball for the Met Office team, and his team, he led the input into the responses to several national and international emergencies, including the food and health outbreak in 2001 and 2007, do don't outbreak in North Europe 2006 and 2008 and 2016 and Icelandic volcanic eruptions 2010 11 and 14, as well as Fukushima nuclear accident. So he is very well familiar with the area, we are going to discuss today. Our next panelist is not there. I don't know, is it better to say Nadezhda or Nadia. Come in Dante, who works in the advanced system analysis program of International Institute for applied system analysis. Dr. Come in Dante is a group leader in the International Institute for NASA, and she leads the cooperation and transformative governance group. This group is dealing with system level transformation and key transition for societal resilience and sustainable system through an enhanced understanding of an ability to manage existing challenges, including societal dilemma and wicked problems of public policy plan. She coordinates and contributes to a number of international projects with the other international organizations such as organization for security in cooperation in Europe. United Nations industrial development organization organization for cooperation and development in Europe, and international inter corruption Academy and many others. This is an offer of the draft of strategy of industrial development of Pakistan, of the handbook on protection of electricity network from natural hazard for the organization for security and cooperation in Europe, which was translated also into Russian and Arabic languages, and contributed to a number of international reports on water energy nexus energy security and participatory governance. The work of Dr. Come and Dante includes more than 140 publications. Among them, the global corruption report, the global assessment, the global assessment report, input papers for the United Nations Office for disaster risk production, the chapter on these governance for global report issues by the global facility for disaster reduction and recovery bank and contribution to the global renewable energy report, as well as a number of the other period publications in the journals, such as energy policy natural hazards renewable and sustainable energy reviews, and so on. Her works also her work also has been wanted the words from academic Council of United Nations, as well as Jules from foundation to receive the number of invitation to speak at a high level forms, such as directorate general for the European Commission, nature, energy, community secretariat energy charter for an organization for security and cooperation in Europe. Welcome to there and thank you for joining us. The last but not the least speaker also very important and very famous and very well known person Dr. William punn from Duke University are from United States. Dr. Punn is Elizabeth Brooke, right and white law right associate professor of population studies and global environmental health at Duke University with primary appointment in the Duke Global Health Institute, a Nikolaus school of environment. He received his doctorate training from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in biostatistics and demography, we focus training in infectious disease environmental epidemiology remote sensing by some special statistics. He has over 20 years of experience studying the relationship between human environment dynamics and health. He leads an interdisciplinary research team that has published over 100 period papers, non scripts on topic, such as metabolic biomarkers in child health, mercury toxicity, infectious disease, vaccine responses and reproductive health. He currently needs research in three areas, the development of malaria early warning system for Amazon measurement of long term health impacts of in terror and chronic mercury exposure in artisanal and small scale gold mining region and evaluation of mercury free and mercury capture technologies in artisanal and small scale. His research has been supported by NASA, the US National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, and bill and million data foundation. Dr. Penn has worked diligently with local stakeholders and partners to maximize a research impact. These includes appointment as director of duty through priority partnership location executives during member of North Carolina, one health scientific advisory committee for the population environment research network and technical science advisory panel for effectiveness evaluation of Minamata convention, which is a global mercury treaty. He has participated in export advisory panels, including one set countdown for climate and health and through through congressional commission on. He goes in Spanish Pueblo Adinos, which worked on the on the have a metals as well, and our unit population and climate change. He has been recognized for his contribution to global health with James, the prezel distinguished loony and National Institute of Health for duty International Center directors it was. Thank you, Dr. Penn for joining us. And with this outstanding panel. I would like to jump in right into our discussion. And I would address the the first question to me is so cool. And this question is our. It looks quite simple. You work in the areas of natural disaster and you work basically with hydro meteorological disaster. And for this area it seems that we have the warning and forecasts for many years and for the person who is not engaged in metrology that may look quite simple, you know, people just go on the internet and look at the weather forecast, and it looks very simple. So my question is that there is a large degree of confidence that we know what happens in the trilogy. And you as a person working for the disaster management, you as probably better than anybody else knows what is the uncertainty, which comes with those forecasts. Is it always easy to take a decision based on the forecast. And when you have the issues and you have a stress on taking the decisions. How do you overcome that. Thank you me soccer the floor is yours. So please tell us, share your experience. Thank you. Thank you very much and believe not everybody from Fiji. With regards to impact based forecasting the Fiji and DMO works very closely with the Fiji met office with regards to areas that have been affected. We have a standard operating procedure in place with with the Fiji met office in regards to cyclone when it's about to approach so we have a 72 hours of impact 48 hours to impact 24 hours to impact and 12 hours to impact. The processes to follow and the actions to do are documented. However, given given given the situation if I must say it changes. And when we are issued warnings. And when we, the end of more usually waits for the track map to be released by the net office. We understand that there are few other you know international organizations that also release track map, but due to the responsible agency and the accountability. We have to use the Fiji met office track map. So as of when the track map is released, the end demo adopts the track map, and use the track map to assist decision makers with regards to one populations that are highly, highly likely to be affected. Government assets that are within the path of the incoming storm. In addition to, you know, transportation that highly likely going to be affected. We also advise government as to when to shut down, you know, flights or phase out, you know, maritime travelers, when to stop boats from traveling. So all these critical decisions from government are done using the track map that is released by the Fiji met office. The uncertainty allies when the exact area of or the landfall continues to change. A classic example was the TCS, a cat five storm cycle that we experienced this year. As of when the cycle was making its way to Fiji from Vanuatu. I think we had about three areas of landfall. And then the last one being at least within within the boundary of eight hours to impact. And so it changed, it continues to change the planning behind the strike map. So the uncertainty lies within that area. Now, one of the ways that we've tried to improve this uncertainty in working with Fiji met office is to have what we call a buffer. Again, trying to minimize uncertainty. We don't, we're still trying to analyze whether wind speed is something that we need to factor in. However, because of the landmass that we have here in Fiji, we've opted to use a buffer. So within the buffer from the eye of the cycle, we have a 50 kilometer buffer from the eye of the cycle, which we classify them as red zone. And then the 100 kilometer becoming our ember and then the anything above that becoming, you know, green or likely to be affected. So using that buffer allows us to consider the uncertainty behind the cyclone track map once it's been issued. And given the time to prepare is also limited to that. It allows us enough time to reach out to the community and also activate our evacuation centers by having that boundary of 50 kilometer from the eye of the cyclone just to allow some uncertainty with regards to the second track map. So, becoming very critical having SOPs in place, you know, having well advanced technology we're fortunate here in Fiji, some of the most of the data that we have are in special format, which allows us at the end demo to analyze data as a result of when we receive the track map to which we are able to advise our government or the leaders about the likely populations that are going to be affected and those that will be affected so the likely versus the actuals. So this is the, you know, the role of the end demo when it comes to impact days forecasting. We're exploring options where we want to use wind speed. We're looking at other options but otherwise as practice for disaster management in Fiji. This is kind of what we're using. It's quite interesting that you speak about the buffer and that you try to minimize the uncertainty by introducing something which would minimize the damage. And if we look at my next question, which I wanted to ask to Dr. Hort, that in the case of far metrology we've seen that you can use the buffers and you can have at least some uncertainty around the forecasting. I know that you've been working with the areas of volcanic eruptions and are when you have a volcanic eruptions it's extremely critical if you need to lend the aircraft so they can still fly. And the volcanic eruptions are probably slightly more uncertain than metrological phenomena. So could you please share your experience on how the uncertainties treated in the cases of volcanic ash spread and how do you make decisions or how do you advise on the decisions if it is safe to fly it or not. So this is the end of the episode of Iyufyat Lyoklu where the whole Europe was standing still, nothing was flying, and then we heard that probably it was not so bad. Certainly thank you Oksana. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. So yeah, I'm going to talk about volcanic ash and specifically about aviation hazards. Obviously there are lots of other hazards associated with volcanic eruptions, but I will focus on that and to pick up on what Oksana has just said. The reason in a way that these are more uncertain than say just metrology is because these types of problems inherit the uncertainty from the metrology. That is a factor and then any other process or any other part of it adds to that. So that's why we get this sort of compounding effect of uncertainties and complexity. Next slide please. So, for those that don't know, in the in the middle there is a map that shows representation of the volcanoes around the world but also sketched onto other areas for the volcanic ash advisory centers. These are nine centers around the world that have responsibility for providing operational advice to aviation on the hazard from volcanic eruptions. And now this is 24 7365 days a year and in fact the volcanic ash advisory centers are tasked with issuing an alert within 20 minutes of them being notified of an eruption or them detecting an eruption and then producing an entire model prediction within an hour. So this is very fast and the chain of and flow information, it needs to be quick as well. So this is a very simplified representation of that. The volcano observatories responsible for monitoring volcanoes in their countries and they have a duty to inform the Vax and cascade the information about the occurrence of the eruption. This may seem relatively straightforward, you know volcanic eruption is can be a fairly big event but volcanoes can be in very remote locations, hard to monitor. quantitatively, which will come to in a bit. You know, it's one thing to say yes interruptions occurring. But if we want to provide a sensible warning, we also need to know the scale of that the characteristics of that. So that information flows to the volcanic ash advisory centers which are based in national meteorological organizations around the world. And there that information is combined with other information and you and models to provide guidance products on the presence of ash, which also talk about more in a minute now that information further then flows on to national meteorological offices in each country for onward dissemination to aviation operators regulators air traffic controls and government bodies what is different here to the talk we just heard is that this service is really focused on providing information to, if you like professional bodies and organizations. This isn't about providing information to the public. Having said that the information is available to the public and is published openly. But the fact that it is aimed at if you like these other organizations does mean that the information is constructed in very specific ways. That's not as file formats to get technical, but also the language used the way things are represented is all tailored to these requirements of the industry and so for others looking at it it can potentially be confusing seem to be missing information seem to contain information that doesn't seem so relevant and use language that isn't perhaps immediately transparent to everyone. So I think an important aspect of some of these communications around hazards is you need to be aware of who it's aimed at and whether or not that of course challenges in the wider area. You know, and that can even extend to other government bodies in the UK we have an in emergencies of scientific advisor group for emergencies that stands up sage and volcanic hazards present other hazards to countries and they may be interested in the information and they will look to this information from the Vax to assist them, but that can require translation because they may be looking at it for other concerns such as why to transport disruption the need to repatriate citizens, etc. And require further interpretation of the information that is being used by the the Vax. So next slide please. We just dig down this these events share lots of commonalities I believe with a range of things we think of nuclear accidents as well as volcanic eruptions large industrial accidents or even biological hazards to animals and plants. We have a series of components that represent and as I mentioned whether is one component of this is where we get some of our uncertainty. We also have what called emissions so that's what's being emitted into the atmosphere and be that volcanic ash volcanic gases or other materials from other events. We then have processes dispersion in this diagram in the atmosphere so how does that material interact with meteorology you know it's not just being blown around it will interact with precipitation humidity in the air. So we have transformations through chemical reaction or other processes that means that that the new compounds are formed and new hazards emerge at different distances from the event. We then have to consider the impact I'll be worried about health or we worried about machinery, you know volcanic ash is primarily a concern for the aviation industry due to the effect it has on engines and airframes, not for the effect it directly has on human health. So just be aware of that think about that. If we have to understand whether what sort of hazard this presents to to our society, and then actions what actions might we take, or actions might others be taking. In a way, this is about supporting action and mitigating. It's not actually about scientific endeavor investigating the problem so we need to make sure our science is fit for those actions to be taken and listen to what the decision makers need, and that's what we as scientists think is the most interesting or important aspect. And all of that is is underlined by considerable uncertainty at every stage. You know, even actions have uncertainty they have consequences how people will respond to instruction. And so there's as uncertainty at every point in this next slide please. Let's go on on the science just just to draw out a couple of examples. We obviously observations are very important we have considerable observation requirements and needs both local to a volcano in this instance, but also remotely from the volcano and we have an example there of a satellite image. But there are uncertainties in those many of these are remote sensing activities are directly measuring the quantities we're interested in, and having to be converted into those quantities that actually matter we then have modeling. And we have not the process there we and there are lots of stages to modeling with the numerical weather prediction or the absolute transport models that can introduce uncertainty. We then have certainly as I said in the impact and this example jet engines how exactly does it affect affect engines. What is that and work here has contributed to an evolution in the presentation and communication. Traditionally, and still widespread use is just a simple hazard area. An example there is just some polygons drawn on the top plot, but increasingly aviation is moving to wanting to work with things like concentrations explicitly. And therefore understand how much a plane is exposed to on a flight path, due to the realization that it's not a case of encounter, you know, ash, or no ash it's actually the amount of ash you encounter gradually degrades engines, and therefore, you can be exposed to limited quantities perfectly but you need to understand those quantities. And that's before we get into probabilities and doing things like ensemble modeling considerable scientific opportunity and across this spectrum next slide please. Okay, so I won't go through all these points on this but just to conclude, events are rare. And they that can present as problems in terms of practicing and evaluating our approaches and and our observation and modeling technique. The next event will always be different. And I think the final and so we need to not get fixated on previous events and plans for the last event we need to prevent ourselves from doing that, if we can. We also need to think about what our science is going to be used for and really think about the fact that the science isn't the end point. It's an important component. And that requires us to do an extra translational step or communication step over and above. If you like the math, the physics, the chemistry, the geophysics that is our core discipline potentially. And that's where we can really have ensure impact and value from our science. Thank you. Over to you, Oksana. Thank you, Matt. That was really bright and are you highlighted several areas of uncertainty and are. You see, we're heard from society that you can do 50 kilometers buffer in your case is probably difficult to do 50 kilometers buffer, because there are many more impacts, we will come to the discussion I wanted to move our forward to our next next, Dr. Pian. And I will ask him the following questions so are as you noticed we organize a debate in the level of the increasing uncertainty so we start from something where we can take the buffer 50 kilometers, then we go to something where actually it comes to the camera fly or come to fly. And I will ask you a very interesting question. You've been at the front as a front runner in the are analysis of the connection between the COVID and metrology and climate. And in the beginning of the pandemic, our people were discussing that probably if it gets former, the virus will not spread and then there was some are let's say non peer review publications but like the first calculations and simple correlations which demonstrated that it could but just it was because spring it was getting warmer, and then it actually gets completely opposite route. And this is the case where information is much more uncertain I mean we know about metrology probably we know something about COVID and you and many other scientists were requested to give advice to the countries and to the authorities. Do we do lockdown, or we don't do lockdown, or how do we manage now. So, can you share your experience on this area of providing scientific robust decisions where we don't have enough information, and then you are super under super stress by the policy makers they just come to you and say, is, does it work, or it doesn't. And you actually don't know. So the question. I think what Dr. Hort just said at the very end is probably the heart of what I will probably respond to about and in stress which is how we communicate science to two decision makers. So let me just say, thank you for for inviting me on this panel it's it's a pleasure to be here among so many great panelists. I'm coming from North Carolina in the US where it's 330 in the morning now so I don't have any slides so you can all look at my brain is sort of working and my mouth is working, but half of me is still sleeping. But for this question on how do we communicate. I guess recommendations to policymakers I had a lot of different thoughts on this but I think I can summarize them in three different points. The first one is that we are always making decisions with imperfect data policymakers always do this they're they're wonderful as you had said oxana. They're wonderful at using not using ignoring and also misinterpreting science sometimes and, and their job is actually to make policy within perfect data. I don't think that we we should not forget that as scientists. I think that for policymakers, and as scientists. We are actually quick to blame them for a lot of the problems that we are, we are having for not listening to data and I can't tell you how many times that I've heard from colleagues, as well as very senior emeritus professors, how their research and recommendations are not being used and they're being ignored by current policy being made. So one here situations where you have one side of an argument with a preponderance of data available, and the trend supporting a particular point of view. And the other side is showing study outliers anecdotal stories that raise questions about the broad applicability of the perceived preponderance of data trends. As a scientist, we can sit back and criticize policymaking, the policymaking process, but we have to remind ourselves that policymaking is not a binary exercise. The final decisions might be and they might be even, you know, more than binary, but just like every science represented here at EU policymaking is political science. There's uncertainty in the decisions there's measurements, there's ideal times at which they want to conduct surveys gather data measure and analyze. But policymaking is a science, and it's subject to the same constraints that we have. And I don't think that's something that's always recognized from a non political science point of view. And that goes to my second point and something that Dr. Hort said. How are we engaging and communicating environmental science to non environmental scientists. So fundamentally, I think every scientist exists to improve human well being. I think that's a pretty accurate broad statement. In my opinion though I think science has been calm has become increasingly exogenous to the political process. And I think that we as scientists have become collectively worse at speaking to policymakers, speaking to stakeholders and to the general public. The result has been an increasingly uninformed political system, an uninformed public. There's lack of diversity and funded research. There are increasingly siloed science and policymaking, and that's all to the detriment of the things that we try to to achieve. And how do we begin to solve this and break down the barriers between scientists and non scientists. I think we start by changing the way we conduct science by becoming endogenous to the political process. And that means that when we conduct science, we must not only work to minimize uncertainties in the hypotheses that we're testing or the goals that we're trying to achieve. We must also jointly minimize the uncertainty in the political decision making process by engaging policymakers and stakeholders from the start. We also have to become greater advocates for our science. And most importantly, as Dr Hort said, advocates for transdisciplinary or multidisciplinary science. But my third point kind of gets to your, your exact question about coven 19. And this comes with how we balance science advocacy versus the advocacy of scientific belief. I'm going to guess that the majority of people tuning in our strong supporters of the idea that global climate change is occurring, and that we must act immediately and definitively to avoid certain temperature thresholds that are predicted to cause catastrophic damage to human and natural systems, including the emergence of novel infectious diseases. So last year, when coven was rapidly spreading. As you mentioned, several scientists were making claims that coven 19 was strongly tied to temperature increases. Some of these claims are based on data. Some of them were extensions of a theoretical link between disease and climate change. And the problem is that the communication of the science and the advocacy became obfuscated very confusing from a general consumer point of view. The science that was being conducted conducted and published in peer reviewed journals were a little bit suspect. I'll give you a couple of examples. So there was one analysis that use daily data from 122 Chinese cities for 38 days between January and February, and they established a linear significant relationship between temperature and coven 19, concluding that there was no evidence that coven 19 would decline with warmer temperatures. Another analysis, another publication, roughly the same timeframe is 40 days that had daily data from 31 provinces in China, and they concluded that the epidemic intensity declined after high temperatures. And then there was a study in Brazil that was also published between February 27 and April 1, just 35 days of data. The temperature had a negative relationship with case counts with a flattening of case counts around 28 point or 25.83 Celsius. And they said in their final statement that it supported governance for healthcare policy making. So I'm not going to sit and debate whether or not these relationships between temperature and coven 19 are real or not. So the question of whether anyone anyone on this call can truly believe that 30 days of data are sufficient to convince you that a climate health relationship exists. I mean, I can guarantee you that if I were to analyze 30 days of case data on malaria, which is my area, or dengue Shigela tuberculosis Ebola to demonstrate that temperature had a significant relationship over 30 day period, and then broadly I can guarantee you how that what that means across a large spatial or temporal scale, I can guarantee you would be rejected from every journal. So the question is why did some of these articles get published. Why were we trying to state whether or not a climate health relationship exists when there really was no statistical power to believe that that relationship was true. I don't even have any ability to replace to place any reasonable confidence and roles around the relationship. I question whether or not this was an attempt for the advocacy of climate science. And I think that's an important question. What I do know is that the articles that I found on the environment health links with coven all come from environmental journals. The articles that I gave you, if you look at the co authors or the authors of the study. They come from a business school school of management, computational modeling physics, which is great that you have an interdisciplinary perspective. There was only one article that I found that was published with anyone with a public health background. What I'm saying that a physicist or computational modeler can't understand or communicate epidemiological findings doesn't mean that their analysis is wrong. What I'm saying is that if you have an interdisciplinary problem, you should have an interdisciplinary team addressing it. Now, whether or not you believe or disagree with me, and you believe that the study conclusions are valid. I think it's undeniable. I think everyone on the call would believe that the communication with policymakers was quite poor in my own country, which is probably the worst example of a politician communicating poorly. But in my own country, we had politicians stating that in the northern hemisphere coven 19 was going to disappear in the summertime, because of warm weather. We're ignoring a lot of confounding factors like human behavior, the host immune system, the environment itself, all of which influence the different transmission risks between the winter and the summer. So, I think that this combined problem of publishing poorly designed studies and then having politicians communicating findings, and sometimes contrasting ways, followed by the major resurgence of coven during the summertime has led to a lot of skepticism and of self and climate science, and it's really threatened our ability to communicate things in a independent scientific perspective. I have another personal example that I can share with you. If someone's curious about mercury and gold mining. I'm not going to go through all the details but I will just tell you that there in my work in Peru. About 10 years ago, had issued a report stating that 80% of people were exposed to a, a threshold of mercury that was considered unhealthy. And my point to them was that the studies that they were the one study that they had used was actually had a design flaw in it, but they still wanted to use their report to generate political support around gold mining and mercury. And that was a tactical strategy that they wanted to use because they needed to take advantage of it now, but it demonstrated the difference between how I would want to use science and communicate it in one way, and politicians need to use it, and communicate it in another way to generate support, generally speaking. You know, there can be consequences to this, as I said before, there's, there's mistrust in science now that is is kind of growing in a way that's most likely unhealthy and threatening for for most people that are on the call. But there are still situations that we have to communicate information without having actual data to support those recommendations. I would say in COVID-19, we didn't have a need to immediately communicate a relationship between climate and health. The most critical thing with COVID was to reduce human life lost. So in other words, we probably needed more information about how non-pharmaceutical interventions were actually slowing transmission. There were theoretical SIR models, which if you know what an SIR model is, and those were helpful. There is, there was data from the pandemic flu in the early 1900s that we could lean on. But there were no real empirical studies that were generated, except I think there was one in Hong Kong and one in Taiwan that provided a little bit of data to say that non-pharmaceutical interventions could work if they were implemented and followed in a certain way. But when we when we do think about communicating information with very limited data and very limited way of quantifying uncertainty, what I would say is, first of all, to do that, you need to have an interdisciplinary team. And I am a biostatistician, so I would recommend that you have at least one statistician on that interdisciplinary team. And I say that basically because when we have limited data, you need to have the content experts present to provide a a transdisciplinary perspective on finding a solution. But you need, in my opinion, a statistician to help each content expert think about the types of uncertainty that might exist in the recommendations that they're giving. It can be helpful. The second thing I would recommend is just being transparent with the assumptions and limitations. That's a very simple one. That's not too difficult in situations where you don't have a lot of data. But the assumptions and limitations are very important and I think it actually goes and has a direct correlation with how we do something called a theory of change. But the last recommendation I would recommend, when especially when we have, you know, information being given to policymakers with limited data is to have an experienced science communicator or a team of communicators be your public face be your public contact. There are examples in COVID, where we have seen very good scientists do a very poor job of explaining science and a very poor job of saying things to the public. It's not to say that they're bad scientists. It's just to say that there are communicators that this is their, this is what they do. They are science communicators, and they are experts in what they do. And we should make sure that we have an expert science communicator to explain things to a diverse public. So I hope these comments are useful. They're based on my own experiences and struggles with science communication and science policy relationships. And I'm happy to answer any questions and reflect on any other thoughts. Thank you very much and your presentation actually provoked already some questions and are are in the question and answer books and I would encourage all the participants actually to go and put their questions in the question and answer box and stop voting for those questions so you can you can put the thumb up. And I would like to start with questions so that we will take those questions first are, but before we move to the question we have one more panelists, who will bring to the story, which are, we am told us are even more complicated because, yeah, we may have an uncertainty we may be the poor communicators. We want to run fast, but what happens is that in those situations which are super critical, we get another phenomena, which is the spread of misinformation, and that information which is not are spread by are people who are not sure, or they don't know are they intentionally spread the misinformation, which actually confuses the policy making, and probably are is Dr. P and rightly said, described science are a damage to us as a scientific community. We have Nadezhda with us was an expert in this information. And I would like Nadezhda to actually tell us a little bit more about how we as a scientific community can distinguish between the real information and misinformation. And what are the implications of this misinformation or wrong information. And the decision making, and how we as a scientific community can protect ourselves when it is already very difficult to communicate science and be very transparent policy making. And that is one of the most dangerous cases of misinterpretation beyond the incorrect information and misinformation, which is spread in particular through social media. Thank you very much for your kind invitation and good morning to everybody and nice greetings from Austria. I'm here also on behalf of my co-authors who come mainly from the University of Stockholm, and also from Hellenistic University in Greece, and the results of this presentation will reflect the results generated in frame of the horizon 2020 project supported by the European Commission, which is called Co-Inform. I would like to start with the background on the misinformation and why it's so damaging now in communication today. And please the next slide. Yes, misinformation is not a new phenomenon. It's existed already for a long time. We have already evidence from the ancient Greece, for example, when misinformation was placed in societies and here I would like to say also that there is a misinformation So the difference is in intention, how intentionally with such kind of information, disinforming news being spread, but nowadays it's becoming especially influential because of technologies. Technologies make the spread of misinformation almost universal. Anybody in any part of the world who has access to internet and who is sufficiently popular to spread it through social networks could spread any kind of news. What is also especially damaging if you go, for example, to behavioral economics and to the work of Kahneman about our systems of reasoning, how we perceive the risk, how we perceive information. There are these two systems, think fast, think slow, and one is much more logical. At the same time as another one is emotional and misinformation is targeting exactly the second one. So it's being placed much faster people perceive it much faster it addresses some kind of emotional triggers and being settled there it's much more difficult to correct because usually the correction tools they are addressing our logical reasoning our logical system. Misinformation creates all kinds of misperceptions, which might lead to prejudice to misconditions they might influence behavior also increases situation and in times of mitigation of crisis so it might become really quite damaging. And one of the points of misinformation is also that it creates information bubbles, especially in the internet and social media which do not really allow for discourse what traditional media usually do. But once misinformation created opinion a precondition of someone, then this person automatically would be searching for further information, which is supporting this misconditions. And this is also especially important for the times of crisis and for understanding for perceiving the risk because frequently here we speak here about subjective perceptions of the risk. So cognitive and behavioral biases which influence the subjectives and misinformation is sitting exactly there. So this is what makes people react differently than what would be actually expected. So misinformation could lead to erosion of public trust also in institutions in the media it could dangerously disrupt the political debate for certain time. The next slide please. So misinformation in social media is getting difficult for several issues. First one, because currently a lot of tools are being developed by technical companies, and we measure the level of trust to different tools and frequently citizens don't trust profit driven technical companies. This legislation often also backfires with accusations of censorship and of course internet is a free space that are democratic freedom so we cannot sense the internet and that is why any kind of correction of misinforming news might be also problematic. So we have to check us, which is a growing and popularity profession now are getting overwhelmed by the volumes of information which have to be checked. And this was especially evident during the last pandemic crisis when the volumes of information became enormous and the quality of this information was not always due to expectations, and always also makes difficulties to create difficulties to address the issue of misinformation. Next slide please. In our project, when we started with the issue of misinformation. The idea was to develop two tools and the tools would target different stakeholders. So we plan to develop browser plugin which would provide users with misinformation ratings of social media posts so it would rate the post. We also provide corrected information, which would be collected through several fact checkers, and this would be the tool which aims mainly for professional users such as journalists impact checkers themselves but also citizens who would like to be informed about misinformation. And then the dashboard for fact checking journalists and policymakers to detect, tracked and predict the spread of evaluation of misinformation on the web. And the beauty of this approach was that it was a co creation of the tools together with stakeholders, so all three groups of stakeholders participated from the beginning. We provided the input they helped us to shape the tools and they helped us to develop the tools, according to their expectations and usability and usefulness of the tools. Next one please. One example is the tool miss info me, which was developed in frames of this project and this tools determines credibility scores for quit accounts so it goes through various quit accounts and it shows this course through the websites and through Facebook pages. One example for Twitter account missing for me scores are based on the following. It provides assessment which is done about the profile coming from published reports. So this is the tool which does not provide judgment by itself but it works like a big data tool which is based on the judgments already done by fact checkers reviewing it with account from the selected profile. And if a profile appeared on the public listings which placed this profile already into relation to misinformation accounts and you could also see it in the tool and it would reduce the score for such news item. It also looks to internet links being used and how the fact checkers evaluated this tool, and it provides the sources which were used for this assessment so it creates complete transfer transparency about what kind of sources were used for such ratings and evaluations. Next one please. We are checking our tools with different groups of stakeholders. So we conduct decision making experiments what is actually important for them in these tools, and we identified that various groups of stakeholders of course have various expectations on the usability of these tools. So decision making experiments based on games on multi criteria decision analysis on rankings were conducted in three countries in Greece, Austria and Sweden, and then evaluated we've decided it mathematical tool, which allows to put mathematical rates on different evaluations and on different alternatives. And what was quite surprising for us it's a dominance of so called passive attitude across all these observed countries towards the tools on misinformation so people would like to be informed. We would like to know who put misinformed news why when how it was spread, but everything what is connected with more active position was actually ranked quite low in terms of preferences. So here we could see that such kind of tools could be mainly used for stimulating critical thinking for providing more transparency. But they cannot people would not really use them for being actively active themselves in the space in the web space while providing more corrective information. Next slide please. Yes, and I would like to thank you for your attention. I would welcome your comments, your suggestions, and I also would like to highlight here that our aim was to create the tool which stimulates critical thinking. So which would break this instant interaction between our perceptions or our emotional perception which forms to subjective risk, which might be formed based on the misinformed news. And create maybe through this tool just like highlighting to stakeholder to citizen who is using it. Hey, please think twice maybe there is something wrong with this news please look for another time for another source. This was the main aim of our tool and this is how I think that would be possible to maybe not really to fight misinformation online but to provide citizens with the tool being better informed about contested issues. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Nadezhda, and I would easily comment if the citizens wanted to check the information. That's another question if they're really interested. And it's, as you mentioned this thing fast thing slow, we are always trapped in the confirmation bias and we're just buying whatever falls comfortable to us. So, I will just jump directly into the questions because we already have 10 questions and I wanted to go through this questions before we get to the conclusion of the session, because questions are very interesting. So just read the questions and then you can reflect on those are whoever from the panel once are to answer the question and then we take the next one. So the first question goes to all panelists, and it seems that we as scientists are currently not communicating with policy makers in an optimal way. This causes the policy makers and politicians to make decisions that are not in line with scientific findings and lead to frustration within the scientific community. How do you think we could improve the link between science and policy making. Should we think about adding very short policy relevant summaries to scientific articles if applicable. Are there other short term solutions that we could consider an implement. Are who want to reflect first. I can see William is are smiling so probably you can start, and I would invite other panelists to provide a short comments on this question as well. Thanks for that question I really like that question. I'll tell you a quick story. I attended a workshop at the world Academy of Sciences and Trieste a couple years ago. It was a train the trainers workshop on science diplomacy. If you know what science diplomacy is it essentially is, is improving communication between scientists and policymakers. The workshop involved both scientists who were chemists atmospheric scientists health workers. It was diplomats and policymakers from all over the world. And the first thing that I learned when people were talking about how to improve science communication was the fact that several people who were policymakers told me that when they meet with scientists, they have a lot of anxiety and talking to scientists. So that was interesting. Because when I talk to policymakers I always am trying to think about how do I have a message that's very clear to them. And so I get anxious about speaking to the science the policy maker. And so the realization that policymakers have probably an equal amount of anxiety maybe even more than what a scientist would have when the scientist and the policy maker gets together to discuss something was a realization that we need to do a better job of just simple engagement. I don't think any policymakers actually I know no policy maker reads peer review journals, unless they actually came from a scientific discipline and then became a policy maker later. But, you know, there are a lot of a lot of ways that we can improve science communication and improvement with talking to policymakers. I think this idea of science diplomacy and training and science diplomacy is is one important step. And that is fundamental to making sure that science is communicated properly and making sure that policymakers are understanding what we are are trying to do. The other thing I would just say which I mentioned in my, my comments is that if you can engage policymakers from the start. So that some of your research questions are actually motivated by by policy by policy questions. I think that's a great way of getting policymakers involved. That's what we do for a lot of our mercury and gold mining research. Just to give you an example, we are talking with the US Department of State, the Ministry of Environment in Peru and the Ministry of Environment Columbia and we have workshops dedicated specifically to generating questions that policymakers have, and whether or not those are things that are already informed by science, or whether those are things that we need to generate information on. And I think that that engagement is very helpful for the policy maker. As an academic I can tell you it's not a, it's not a rewarding exercise in terms of writing publications and generating peer reviewed data. It does have a purpose for making sure that science is communicated properly. So, I'll start there. Thank you are other panelists wanted to comment on this or I think of a city you are probably scientists who is a policy makers at the same time. What do you think about that is it. Do you find it difficult to communicate science and Fiji. Thank you. I guess it's a case by case basis for us in Fiji being a developing country and being part of government, the lack of research and science that's championed by government in itself. So therefore coming in wearing my scientist hat into the role, and, you know, advising government about scientific proof methodology that we need to adopt. It's giving them a whole different perspective about, you know, decision making impact based forecasting has been used around the world for years. When I went into the role I introduced the, you know, the 50 kilometer buffer zone, just to ensure that we narrow down our response effort to be more focused and to be more targeted. So, the, you know, the, the information the projects you know there's a lot of research has been done across the Pacific. It now comes down to government taking ownership of those projects and championed it. And this is something that we're currently doing at the end of it's not only attending to response, but also we are now working on actually writing papers to further enhance the knowledge and the skills that we have here within our own government. One of which, which I'd mentioned earlier we're currently developing impact based forecasting paper using traditional knowledge versus science. There's a lot of traditional knowledge here in Fiji about forecasting a major tropical cyclone when it's about to make, you know, when it's developing. You see us before it happened or even before it hit Fiji, there were already signs that was, you know, the eldest within Fiji were already sharing that there's going to be a major cyclone that's going to make an impact. And, you know, a couple of weeks later that did make an impact. So this critical information is something that we want to document. And to that, you know, government is now looking for Fiji. We are focusing on, you know, scientific proof and methodology. And this is something that the NGMO is now working towards very closely with the Met Office, you know, with our systemology unit to ensure that when we advise our leaders it is based out of science. And this is a new approach that we're trying to do to ensure that we bring the science into policy. And in doing that we're able to change our policy to forecast the impacts of any disaster and also it's assisting us with our response effort. Thank you Vasidi. This is actually very interesting because we see quite an interesting difference in the messaging between William and Vasidi. It seems that there is a slightly higher trust in science in developing countries than in developed countries. Matt, you want to say something? Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, I agree with both of the previous panel members have said and I think a big part of this is about what I call peacetime communications. It's about building that relationship, which actually can be harder for less frequent events, because, you know, we don't have the motivation for those conversations. And this is we also, it's not about talking to policymakers, I get quite worried when people talk about talking to it should be about a conversation. It's a two way process we need to listen to them, and then adjust how what we're doing in line with with that. Because some of it's, it's not always about communicating badly and we need to improve our communication at the end of their decision making process isn't just about science. It's just to get hung up that the science says they should do this, they didn't do that. But there can be other reasons why they didn't do it, not just misunderstanding. There can be economic things that can be social, societal reasons for not doing it. There can be other consequences, you know, evacuating a town, you will kill somebody through the process of evacuation, you will injure people through the process of evacuation. So you need to balance that against the danger posed by what the hazard is. And it's not always just a cut and dry question so we do need to sort of separate I think between aspects that arise due to poor communications and lack of understanding, and therefore poor decisions, and decisions that arise due to a balancing between good information that just happened to come down on the side that a scientist we think is perhaps the wrong side. Just just along the lines which you said, mentioning economic issues are, I will just read a comment, which is not on the top of our list but it's number three, which actually equals to what you say. And the question is put by an anonymous attendee saying that in Germany will have a completely different problem. Interdisciplinary scientists had direct contact to high-ranked politicians explaining them are the secured fact and limitations making forecasts for different scenarios. They were ignored because of economic reasons, and the forecasts raising number of infection came true. The political pattern was in is listen, ignore, fail, repeat. It occurs quite well. So there are multiple other factors that can actually play a significant role. So I will take one more question which is on the top of the list and which says it is addressed to all the panelists. And I think that that's the last question we will probably able to answer are, would you say that being an activist as a scientist in order to reach out to policymakers makes you more or less credible. When I align my research with my behavior I feel that I must do more than publish in order to communicate with policymakers and general public are who want to take this one. I think I would also shortly address also to the previous one to the science to because this is a very interesting question for us and actually at the other we are dealing with the question of science to policy divide already for quite some years. We are not purely research organization but how our management, our director used to say the organization which stands on two legs one leg is research and science and another leg is a policy so we have to harmonize the science to policy divide also for our research. And yes, so I would like to say that communicating with policymakers we have communication department which helps us with policy briefs. And it shows to be sometimes very intensive interaction because we are scientists used to use special words and these people are helping us how such message could be shaped in a way that it would be perceived accordingly so that it would be usable for policymakers. And we also have science diplomacy officers who help with dissemination of knowledge. I also would like to mention here different votes that of course scientists so they exist in the vote of peer reviewed papers but as it was said, also before policymaker would seldomly read it peer reviewed paper and beside the surface the databases are frequently also don't even though we try to publish open access it's not always available to everybody but one of the efficient ways is to speak at policy forums. And there is a number of organizations which does a fantastic work in this respect like for example we see has several rounds where they bring scientists they bring experts to talk to policymakers to provide the input to stimulate discussions. So there are also other organizations so there are these policy events. But I also think that in scientific career also providing policy impact should be should create also some value because currently we are evaluated by peer reviewed papers by impact by patients, but policy impact is not yet so so much in coming. And while addressing the issue of activism and advocacy. I think of course it's important to work also with various stakeholders and involve their perceptions and opinions in the research but for us as a scientist so I think it's important to stay also neutral, especially in the social science of course we all have positions and we look through certain lenses on societal events but still trying to keep maybe this one neutral position, despite any fact which we see and be honest and transparent about assumptions. I think this, this might be a way to go. Thank you very much. Are anybody else wanted to reflect on how does it compare being activists can be suggest. Does it discredit our science become activist. Any fast reflections on that before we go to voting. Just have a quick comment on that. I guess for us here from experiences as alluded in the discussion, you know the difficulty of having to interpret science language if I must say. Obviously practice. A lot of our researchers have been done in a, you know, done in a very technical way that as respondents to disaster management which we should really think in in general context because we're responding and for us life saving is having a very technical paper really does not help you know disaster manager who does not have the scientific head. So this is something that has been practice over the years, as if a farmer say having a very scientific paper done and left to to an old to NDMO in our case left to our office. So for us, those that have been here before me, not understanding basically what is in the paper because our main mandate is to save lives. So, again, realluding to what the you know the forum has been discussing the importance of leveraging the terminology used to ensure that you know non science background can also take the important message out of that information. It's critical for for disaster management disaster management such as us. Thank you very much. We would like to do the mentor but before we go to mentor can I can I just ask all the panelists are just in one sentence to to communicate a key message which you want our community to take from this debate. Matt, please, what is the key message. The key message. Thanks. I think it's, I think it is that we shouldn't shy away from the uncertainty, even when we can't quantify it. We should acknowledge its existence in our communications and in the way we talk about the work. It may not always be possible to integrate it properly or to use it properly and there are challenges with user acceptance of uncertainties, but to not include discussion of it is to undermine our science in the long term. Thank you. Thank you. I think that was a great message that Matthew just said, I would, I would probably have my, my main message, just to add on to that one is, is the use of science diplomacy for improving science communication. Thanks. Yes, my key message is that sometimes such issues, misinformation tend to be ignored, but I would like to highlight again the importance of this issue and that we need tools to address it, because without them, the efforts on communication they could disappear from the effects of information and technologies are now making it possible. But at the same time, we should also consider other ongoing processes like for example, we should not limit democratic rules or sense the internet. So, yeah, this is a little bit of contested policy issue, but I am certain that solution could be could be found and also to back up on the previous message that science diplomacy is important in communication. Vasitya, what is your key message? We already heard your message, we are to save lives. I guess, you know, I can't beat what the others have just mentioned. However, I would probably just say, you know, we need to use science to strengthen community engagement, making that a priority in all phases of disaster response. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, panelists. And now we will see if this is a key message, which our community took from this discussion. Voila. So, well, from the screen you can see that you guys on the panel are probably exceptional cases because the majority of scientists we can see that it's 29 versus 13. So there are three quarters who actually are have never been in a situation when they have to provide a decision making relevant scientific information. So I think that they understood from this discussion, how difficult it is. Claudia, can we move from you to the next one? So how comfortable are you to communicate information that did not get through peer review? So, which is the information that is preprints or, I don't know, some stuff on the internet. All right, that's interesting. So we have some, some clients for Nadezhda who are very comfortable to communicate whatever they find in the internet. So this, this is, this is quite interesting so people are quite comfortable are to communicate information which hasn't gone through peer review, which is quite an interesting conclusion though it can be just the law of small numbers where we have. Non-representative statistics, but it seems that it's between rather uncomfortable and rather comfortable and it's not really super extreme reactions. Can we move on to the next one? So do you think it is the obligation of the scientific community to provide information for critical decision making? Okay, I think that this is really great feedback that most of the community think that it is our role to an obligation to provide the scientific information for critical decision making. So this is, this is really very great outcome. At least we just need to learn how to do it. Let's move on. Thanks question, please. So the next question is, does your organization have a position on decision support by the employees? Like, do you know if there is any regulation like a director or your executive tells you that you cannot talk to, you cannot talk to our general public or to anyone and you have a regulation which prevents you from communicating or you have a policy where you are quite open and you can go and communicate the signs to the our critical decision making. This is actually a good thing for thought because we can see that most of the people actually don't know if such policy exists in the organization or not. So, and probably if you don't know, you're very uncomfortable communicating whatever you want to say. Excellent. So let's move on to the next question. And I think this is our last, no, the one before the last one. This are do you assist in distilling the facts from misinformation. You personally as a scientist. Do you advise anybody to go to social media and write in the blocks that this is nonsense. We can move on to the next question we can see yes that are quite a substantial percentage of the scientists actually do such function on the social media. And our last question is, what is a key message from this debate. What did you bring into your knowledge into your life into your understanding from this great debate. So, I think that from this picture, we can see that Matt communicated the message very clearly. Don't shy away from uncertainty. If there is uncertainty, communicated, said, say what we know, or what we don't know. I think that was excellent. And with this conclusion, I would like to thank all our panelists are you were brilliant are your interventions were absolutely marvelous and super interesting. I think that are people who wanted to repeat or follow up the debates they will be recorded and they will be available from you so that they can follow up on the debates and they can, they can actually listen to it once again. So, super special thank goes to Bill, which probably already asleep. Good morning. Thank you very much for joining us are. Thank you, Vasity for joining us from Fiji. Thank you, Nadia and Matt for for joining this this beautiful discussion, and thanks to the audience who followed these conversation. Thank you very much and have a great day.