The impact is severe for the action research network. The platform was engineered to support Moodle, Canvas, expert system development, the production of new one health courses, and the release of open materials. It was a bleeding edge suite offering capabilities far beyond what any single group could sustain independently, yet hosted on a low cost provider to ensure equitable access. The intention was to guarantee that every working group could operate with advanced tools, coordinated processes and a unified structure without bearing individual costs. That foundation enabled not only educational outputs but also research integration, shared data handling and prototype deployment across the entire COST area.

This collapse removed all of it. The system was more than a server. It was an essential backbone for building the next generation of open educational and research infrastructures. Its destruction represents a profound organizational failure and a heavy setback for the collective effort. This failure demands a clear assessment. Poor coordination and weak support collided with proper planning and erased the system that should have anchored the work ahead. The result reflects a lapse in professionalism that must not recur. A network of this scale requires steady organisation, firm responsibility and coherent execution.

The infrastructure was built to embody ethical and open governance. It enabled transparency, shared oversight, real checks and balanced participation. It offered each group the material means to work at the same level, with access to strong tools and a unified structure. These standards must become the norm. Planning, timely action and open dissemination are essential to protect collective progress and ensure continuity. This network exists to strengthen education with committed allies and to model a responsible way of working. The wider world shows how quickly systems collapse when discipline fails and how easily societies turn to harmful paths rather than constructive ones. Our role is to teach a different course and to avoid reproducing the same destructive patterns. To do so, we must uphold the highest expectations at every step and never allow a preventable lapse to undermine the work of many. The network is meant to grow strong, not weakened by disregard for one another’s efforts. Professionalism and responsibility are the minimum required to respect each other’s work and to protect what we build together.

The damage reaches far beyond the technical layer. It disrupts the immediate path toward offering the network a unified workspace designed to guarantee equitable access to advanced digital capabilities at no cost for any member. The intended architecture was built to overcome structural organisational weaknesses by providing a robust system where every group could operate autonomously while remaining aligned. That system required careful engineering and continuous refinement to allow real collaborative work at scale. All of it has now been wiped out.

This outcome is more than a setback. It is a severe signal of dysfunction: the very set of power tools intended to secure coherence, ethical governance and enable proper coordination was destroyed by a basic failure of goodwill and proper coordination. The loss undermines the confidence of participants who dedicated considerable effort to building the platform, and it communicates a message that their work can be erased not by technical error but by inattention to a trivial administrative requirement. It is a tragic case of self sabotage, one that inadvertently devalues the labour contributed by many and casts doubt on the collective ability to protect shared achievements.

The erased system cannot be restored through a simple reactivation of the subscription. Rebuilding demands a full repetition of the previous effort, step by step, component by component. The hundreds of hours of work were not an abstract investment. They represented the transformation of raw infrastructure into a functional foundation for a continent wide initiative. Their disappearance has destroyed ongoing achievements and interrupted the momentum that had finally begun to solidify a common operational space.

There is a narrow but real silver lining. The hosting provider is now offering the possibility to migrate to two dedicated machines built on AMD EPYC 7002 Data Center Series processors. These units deliver far greater computational density, higher parallelisation and stronger I/O throughput than the previous setup. For essentially the same monthly cost once the outstanding fees are settled, the network would gain a backbone capable of doubling the overall capacity. This means smoother video conferencing, stronger real time collaboration, faster file handling and a robust environment for Nextcloud, Moodle, expert systems and any new services required by schools and administrations.

The EPYC 7002 line is engineered for sustained multi core workloads. It brings large cache banks, high memory bandwidth and efficient virtualization, allowing multiple services to run simultaneously without contention. For our use case this translates into stable BigBlueButton calls, low latency for shared editing, reliable data storage operations and room to integrate advanced computational layers such as AI assisted tutoring or simulation modules. It is the type of hardware ordinarily reserved for large institutions, yet accessible to us at a modest cost. Not accepting such an upgrade would be senseless.

Behind this opportunity stands human ingenuity in its best expression. Each component of these systems, from processor architecture to protocol stacks, reflects decades of rigorous engineering, collective research and disciplined cooperation. These technologies did not appear by chance; they were designed by people who worked methodically, respected constraints and maintained standards. The only reason we can deploy a continent spanning educational platform on inexpensive hardware is because those principles were upheld by earlier generations of scientists and engineers.

This is the model to follow. With stable infrastructure, proper responsibility and careful technical work, we can build a sustainable, secure and powerful environment for the whole network. The power tools exist, and we must keep on improving it all for the common good of future generations. The hardware is available and the mission is clear. The challenge is to meet the level of discipline that such systems require.

No further communications or outputs will be issued until the outstanding matter is resolved and a stable foundation is re established. This pause is necessary to prevent additional losses and to ensure that, once work resumes, the infrastructure will be safeguarded against a recurrence of this type of disruption. This text is accompanied by a new video on the human factor as the source of all environmental destruction that is also destroying the preconditions for healthy and prosperous human life.

To introduce the action roadmaps and the new integrated systems, two online meetings will take place on the 9th and 12th of December at 10 AM CET Madrid time. These sessions will explain how coordination, research, pedagogic development and implementation will be structured across the network, and how the tools now available will support the scientific, educational and governance work expected from us. Joining at least one meeting is strongly recommended so that all participants can operate within the shared environment from the outset and engage in the collective tasks ahead. The action is now entering a period in which coordinated work, shared resources and common standards become essential for delivering the scientific and educational objectives set for the COST area. A unified digital environment has been deployed to support this collective endeavour, ensuring that every member can reach the same materials, collaborate transparently and contribute to the production of open course ware in a coherent and reliable manner. All members have already received an email enabling them to set their password and activate their single credential for the entire infrastructure:

https://nextcloud.health.int.eu.org/

Nextcloud provides an integrated workspace where storage, editing, scheduling and coordination operate in one place under our direct governance. It centralises documents, calendars, shared folders, templates, task boards and real time collaborative writing through Collabora. This removes dependence on external providers, ensures compliance with European data protection requirements and keeps all materials persistent and accessible to every member of the action. Workflows become clearer, since drafts, reviews, curricular materials and administrative documents remain organised, versioned and traceable. It strengthens governance by offering unified spaces for planning, role assignment and progress monitoring through calendars, Gantt structures and Kanban boards.

https://tele.health.int.eu.org/done/deal/

BigBlueButton adds a specialised communication layer focused on education and scientific collaboration. It delivers videoconferencing with breakout rooms, polls, shared notes, whiteboards, screen sharing and session recording stored in the same environment. Its integration with Nextcloud avoids platform fragmentation and keeps every meeting within our infrastructure.

In combination, both systems give the action a coherent digital backbone. They enable secure teamwork, standardised procedures, documented outputs and coordinated participation across the full geographic spread of the network, while maintaining full control over data, continuity and long term scientific and educational reliability. Both systems integrate cleanly with Moodle and other open source pedagogic platforms, allowing us to develop, test and deliver the open courseware the action must generate. Nextcloud supplies the shared authoring environment where curricula, lesson plans and evaluation instruments are drafted, while Moodle and related tools provide structured learning spaces for pilots, comparative evaluations and classroom deployment. BigBlueButton embeds directly into Moodle, enabling live teaching, workshops and demonstrations without leaving the platform. This coherence allows the action research network to build a unified educational pipeline where materials are conceived, refined, taught and assessed across countries in a consistent and reproducible manner.

All members are encouraged to sign in. Each participant must have now received an email enabling them to set their personal password. A single unified credential will serve for every component of the EU BEACON infrastructure, present and future. This approach reduces friction, avoids duplicate accounts and keeps the entire ecosystem more secure and easier to operate. For a European and COST area wide network committed to open science, it ensures transparent access, controlled governance and stable continuity. It raises our operational standard by aligning every tool with the same identity layer, strengthening collaboration, increasing reproducibility and preserving long term integrity across the full breadth of our shared work. Open science rests on transparency, accessibility and verifiability. It means that knowledge, methods and outputs are shared transparently, remaining available for scrutiny, reuse and improvement rather than confined to closed systems. This principle strengthens scientific reliability and accelerates progress, since results can be reproduced, compared and expanded by any qualified group. It also aligns with the ethical obligations of publicly funded work, ensuring that insights and tools generated through collective effort remain accessible to all stakeholders.

We rely on open source because it offers full control over the tools we use while allowing technical inspection, adaptation and long term preservation. These platforms do not lock us into corporate policies, shifting pricing structures or opaque data handling. They allow the network to maintain sovereignty over sensitive educational and scientific materials, scale the infrastructure as required and integrate components as needed. Beyond software, the same logic extends to our outputs in the form of open course ware. Teaching materials, curricula, evaluations and methodological guidelines become resources that others can adopt, adapt and improve, creating a cumulative effect.

All members are kindly requested to follow these standards and adopt the shared infrastructure as the central environment for organising work, developing documents, coordinating tasks, managing calendars and maintaining internal communication. It all will be further presented, and migration further facilitated, during the video calls and next posts. Using the same space ensures coherence, reduces fragmentation and allows every contribution to be visible, traceable and aligned with the action objectives. This unified approach strengthens our collective capacity, supports rigorous scientific and educational output and provides the stability required for effective collaboration across the entire network.

This model maximises impact because it transforms the action into a generator of shared capacity rather than a closed unit producing isolated deliverables. Once materials and tools are openly available, implementation across the COST area becomes easier, faster and more consistent. Collaborative refinement by educators, researchers and institutions leads to iterations that strengthen quality and relevance. Over time, this approach builds a living system where improvements continue beyond the duration of the mandate, expanding the reach of our work and deepening its influence across the educational and scientific landscape.

The action Nextcloud platform will be populated over the coming days with tasks, calendars, working group documents, templates and all materials required for coordinated work. By Sunday or Monday a further update will be posted in the media kit, including a new video and complementary resources, together with news on the media campaign and the announcement of the finalised new website. This will complete the initial communication layer and provide a clear entry point for all members to follow developments and participate in the shared activities.

I am wishing you all a wonderful weekend.

This post presents the last video of our media kit. Please, share it to anyone you wish. It is also meant as a big apology for the delay in setting up the entire server infrastructure of our EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies COST action. The additional time invested in getting all ready has been essential to ensure full technical reliability, security, and scalability. The system had to be strong enough to serve not only this action but also the broader vision of an interconnected European and global education and research network. The last few utilities are being added. With the forthcoming sharing, including all user access credentials, expected within two or three days, the action will gain the means to operate efficiently, conserve resources, and expand its impact.

The new environment will enable working groups, researchers, educators, and institutions across the COST area to collaborate transparently and autonomously, with tools designed for real-time coordination and open governance. The pooled resources will be at your entire disposal. A full COST area media and outreach campaign will follow immediately after the release. It will introduce the action, our goals, our systems, and invite wider participation from new members and partner institutions. Public announcements, short explanatory videos, and coordinated communications will accompany this rollout to ensure visibility and engagement across platforms and potentially allied organizations.

The launch is imminent. Tutorials and guidance materials will be published from next week after the release onward, to help all users navigate the new power tools and utilities already deployed. Accounts are now being finalized. Credential will be sent to each member by email. The systems, which proudly will include governance systems to allocate the budget democratically, a work group organization suit, a cloud platform and office solution, as well as an open source chat bot with conversational capabilities and an expandable knowledge base, are almost ready for use. All within our servers, without paying any fees for the software; all ready to be further improved, integrated, developed into a research and pedagogical pure blend distribution for schools and other actions and centers. This moment marks the beginning of a new phase in which a stronger, transparent, and sustainable one health education network becomes capable of acting decisively across Europe and beyond.

Thanks for being part of it, wishing you all the best.

Summary: a new video is being produced as part of our upcoming media kit and campaign, social media presence and new members invitation efforts, accompanying the launch of the new website. This is coordinated through the newly established communications working group, which is set to keep on building and maintain the full communications infrastructure of the action under the highest standards of open science and pedagogy to ensure all members operate within a robust, well-equipped environment. Shared resources and official materials, including letterheads for outreach to governmental and institutional partners, as well as contact lists, are being prepared to support unified and effective communication with all relevant stakeholders. The collective effort now moves toward engaging potential allies and consolidating collaborations across national and international levels.

Please, unsubscribe if not interested. Next post is expected by next Friday, European time.

A dedicated communications working group to coordinate both internal and external communications across all BEACON activities is being set. If interested in contributing, please contact the group mailing list comms@health.int.eu.org. This group will be responsible for developing and maintaining the full communications infrastructure, keeping all members updated, ensuring clarity, coherence, and accessibility in all exchanges. It will also assist members and teams in managing updates, announcements, and media outputs, providing continuous support to keep all initiatives aligned and progressing efficiently.

As for the soon to be released new short film, it marks the beginning of a broad and transparent expansion across all COST countries, preparing new consortia, funded missions, and measurable results. It conveys our collective duty to advance education, health, and governance as one, to support those most in need first, with children’s learning, well-being, and future as our highest priority. We will soon be sharing the finalized video. Below follows the text of the voice-over soon to be read, heard, and seen with subtitles in full multimedia format:

This is our call to action, important among the most essential of our time.

The biosphere is failing, and with it, the foundations of life. Biodiversity loss, antimicrobial resistance, climate instability, famine, and social unrest are clinical manifestations of one disease: systemic neglect.

Our duty is to intervene, with reason and precision, through education grounded in science and delivered through the best technological means made available to all. With rigour, expertise, and full commitment, we must ensure learning, equity, and prosperity, taking from despair to thriving all children, future leaders, from every background, prioritizing those most in need.

Planetary evidence is conclusive. The rate of species extinction surpasses natural levels by over a thousandfold. Coral reefs, amphibians, pollinators, and apex predators are vanishing together. Soils lose fertility, oceans acidify, and the atmosphere overheats. The self-regulating mechanisms of the biosphere are breaking down. Human survival now depends on restoring environmental homeostasis through coordinated, evidence-based education and governance.

We now work within EU BEACON One Health Education via New Technologies COST action, a coordinated European framework under the Cooperation in Science and Technology programme. COST sustains collaboration across more than forty countries and welcomes participation from third nations committed to transparency, open science, and collective responsibility.

The task is clear. To integrate human, animal, and environmental health education through advanced and open technologies. EU BEACON One Health Education via New Technologies COST action coordinates education and research systems serving more than one and a half billion people, including over three hundred million children whose health and future depend on timely intervention. Within four years, the action will deliver open courseware, digital infrastructures, and participatory teaching methods that connect science, policy, and governance. The goal is to establish a sustainable, measurable, and inclusive foundation for global One Health education, building capacity, strengthening institutions, and enabling prosperity.

This is a coordinated clinical response to planetary disorder. The action’s duty is to create and maintain an excellence network spanning continents, empowering experts and institutions to assist those most affected, including educators, researchers, and professionals operating at the frontlines of environmental and health crises. By doing so, it advances careers, generates employment, and ensures that innovation serves recovery and stability.

The symptoms of collapse are clear. Forests lose carbon balance. Oceans lose oxygen. Pathogens gain hosts. Conflicts and forced migration arise from scarcity. Pollution and ecological degradation amplify hostility, exploitation, and war. Hate and negligence are secondary infections of a sick planet. These cannot be treated without restoring ecological and educational balance.

Antimicrobial resistance continues to spread. Misuse of antibiotics, industrial waste, and weak surveillance allow microorganisms to evolve beyond therapeutic control. Hospitals, once centers of healing, now propagate resistant infections. Prevention depends on stewardship, wastewater management, vaccination, and genomic monitoring.

Starvation remains a measurable pathology, with devastating effects, direct and indirect, leading to conflict. Avoidable deaths, all. Misery, on a never ending cycle of destruction, unless stopped. Over forty-five million children face acute malnutrition, and more than three million die every year. In the COST area, over thirty million citizens live in food insecurity. Conflict, institutional breakdown, and disease increase the toll. Environmental degradation already causes over thirteen million deaths annually. Within EU BEACON One Health Education via New Technologies COST action, prevention replaces reaction. Surveillance, open data, and education form the operational protocol for restoring biospheric balance through coordinated science, pedagogy, and governance.

Time is short, yet adaptation remains possible if action is immediate, equitable, and based on evidence. Humanity remains the only therapeutic agent capable of reversing decline.

Humanity at its best lives long, in peace and in health. Science and technology serve all equally. Education prevents decay and conflict before they arise, transforming ignorance into competence and despair into collective purpose.

This is a call to act with precision and to repair the conditions that generate conflict, poverty, and neglect. Science and technology must remain open, freely accessible, and developed by the best to aid the most vulnerable, within and beyond our professions.

EU BEACON One Health Education via New Technologies COST action stands open to the best experts. Join this coordinated effort to lift institutions, strengthen systems, and guide a population of more than one and a half billion people across over forty countries, including hundreds of millions of children, toward sustainable recovery. It is a global action, systemic, preventive, and indispensable.

Act with precision. Apply knowledge as treatment. Educate to prevent. Restore to prosper. The tools exist. The duty is ours. The time is now.

The video will be released in this publication, the action one, and Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@onehealthedtech

I hope you all enjoy this one. I am also setting social media profiles, and other required additions in motion. My apologies again for all delays. Again, please join in the communications group, if you wish, as we have a massive a lot to do. Write a message to comms@health.int.eu.org to be included, get to coordinate and take all ongoing forward together. Thank you all! Wishing you all a great end of the week.

The action network, already over half thousands members strong, is now expanding to become a coordinated excellence framework linking universities, research institutes, agencies, enterprises, and civil society across the entire COST area and cooperating regions. The action stands as the central educational implementation of the European and global one health framework, connecting open science, open technology, and participatory governance to reform education systems and create sustainable opportunities that benefit all, particularly the most in need.

It is growing to connect universities, research institutes, government administrations, enterprises, and civil society in a balanced, interdisciplinary ecosystem integrating medicine, veterinary sciences, public health, computer science, engineering, law, anthropology, sociology, economics, pedagogy, policy, and ethics. COST funds these networks through the Horizon Europe framework under the oversight of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Innovation. Evaluation and selection are performed by independent experts to guarantee transparency, accountability, and scientific excellence. Within this framework operates EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies, a major pan-European initiative involving national ministries, regional governments, and international agencies in coordinated reform. Our action is one of the few ongoing comprehensive efforts addressing full educational transformation through one health integration and open technological means, an essential, urgent, and paramount contribution to the structural improvement of Europe’s research, education, and health systems.

As of 2025, the COST Association finances and coordinates networking activities across forty-five full member states, one cooperating member, one partner member, and nine Near Neighbour Countries, forming an extended scientific and educational cooperation zone of fifty-six participating nations. The framework encompasses the entire European Union and its associated states, including the United Kingdom, Türkiye, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and all Western Balkan and Eastern Partnership nations, with Israel as the cooperating member and South Africa as partner. Near Neighbour participation extends the network to North Africa and the Middle East, including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, and Tunisia, while Ukraine retains a dual status as both member and neighbour under transitional arrangements. Collectively these countries represent 1.18 billion people, of whom 450.4 million reside within the European Union. Their aggregated institutional capacity, built under the Horizon Europe Framework and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, makes COST the largest coordinated structure for open research and education in existence.

Within this area, and globally, the need for comprehensive one health education has become structurally urgent. Ecological instability, accelerating zoonotic risk, environmental degradation, and social and economic fragmentation now converge into a single systemic vulnerability that demands a scientifically literate, operationally prepared, and ethically grounded population. The problem is perennial with humanity. Civilizations have repeatedly risen and fallen through the same pattern of ignorance, division, and disregard for interdependence. Every major religion and ethical system, from early scripts to contemporary teachings, calls humanity to respect one another, to safeguard life, and to act as responsible stewards of the natural world. Yet these imperatives remain unfulfilled without the scientific and technological means to translate them into coordinated global action. Only through education rooted in evidence and compassion can the divides between belief, culture, and policy be bridged. Science and technology are not in opposition to moral duty but its necessary instruments, providing the shared framework for truth, understanding, and peace that every civilization has sought.

The EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies action responds directly to this condition. It is mandated to set the ground for further coordination by creating a solid excellence network, uplift the careers of all members -specially the most in need-, develop the educational, digital, and governance systems required to convert awareness into competence and competence into collective capability, and achieve its successful implementation. The initiative establishes the curricular and infrastructural backbone linking biomedical, environmental, computational, and social knowledge through open access, open science, and transparent governance. Its purpose is systemic readiness: to ensure that the entire COST area and its partners, and ultimately the global community, can meet the convergent crises of this century with populations educated to understand, preserve, and enhance the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems as one continuous and indivisible system. The achievement of peace, resilience, and shared progress depends on this integration of knowledge and ethics through education, which remains humanity’s most powerful and most responsible technology.

Our action aligns its governance and ethical structure with that of all major scientific networks, enforcing the highest standards of open science and ethical democratical, transparent, governance. We are inspired by, among other, the coordinated work of the five European agencies driving the one health agenda further in other fronts: the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the European Environment Agency (EEA), and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). Together they form the backbone of the European approach to integrated health, risk governance, and environmental protection. EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies extends the reach, as mandated, to the scientific development and regulatory educational domain, ensuring that the next generation of citizens, professionals, and policymakers is trained under the same unified one health principles. At the global level, the action contributes to the quadripartite partnership between the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), all of which have formally committed to place one health at the top of the international agenda to respond coherently to the planetary health and societal crises humanity faces. Our action represents the educational and technological implementation arm of this global framework within the COST area and its cooperating regions.

From here, we are setting the foundations to reach millions. The expansion campaign is already set to reach over half million experts and institutions. EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies action is set to write and implement new open courseware curricula in every COST member state, cooperating country, and third partner nation that joins our open network. This will only happen once we reach the required agreements with Ministries of Education, school districts, EU authorities and abroad, and all required allies. All work is ongoing as required. The network is now expanding rapidly, numbering in the thousands of researchers, educators, clinicians, engineers, and public officials. Funding is structured to lift careers and institutions alike, consolidating an excellence network that supports the creation of new consortia for major Horizon Europe and Erasmus+ calls, commissions publications and edited volumes, coordinates co-authored scientific papers and books, and co-develops open source software and educational materials.

To ensure full transparency and democratic governance, members will gain access this weekend to the Leantime project platform and the Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform, which together provide complete oversight of all financial and operational processes. The budgeting platform allows real-time voting and tracking of every expenditure, ensuring ethical distribution and collective responsibility for each euro invested. Prearranged mission proposals and new member proposals will be published in open form, coordinated with other missions, and aligned with BEACON’s objectives. All submissions will follow open science and open data principles, with results freely published for the benefit of all.

The Element communication system: http://element.health.int.eu.org/, remains the primary collaborative environment, maintaining continuous dialogue between working groups. The conference system, based on BigBlueButton: https://tele.health.int.eu.org/show/tell/, will provide secure, open-source videoconferencing and training rooms. Scheduling of collective meetings will be determined automatically by the integrated time-optimization module, ensuring equitable participation across time zones and full recordkeeping of discussions. Only these online formats will be officially supported and financed for coordination, training, and dissemination, guaranteeing sustainability and inclusiveness.

This weekend we will also be sharing the action new hybrid conference organization suite, integrating BigBlueButton for live conferencing, Framadate for collective scheduling, NextCloud for document sharing, LibreOffice Online for real-time collaborative editing, and LibreTranslate for multilingual communication. These systems operate as one coherent infrastructure, enabling every member to plan, host, and document events seamlessly within the same environment. They provide full transparency, security, and interoperability and are already trusted by leading European institutions, including the Directorate General for Informatics and the European Data Protection Supervisor. The unified platform allows the action to conduct meetings, workshops, and training sessions entirely online or in hybrid formats while maintaining complete control of data and operations within European jurisdiction. EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies will not only deploy but actively contribute to the continued improvement of these open-source systems through its missions, enhancing their accessibility, stability, and usability for all. This contribution will benefit educational institutions globally by offering free, high-quality alternatives to commercial software, reducing costs, increasing digital sovereignty, and enabling full participation in scientific and educational collaboration. The impact will be immediate and profound, empowering schools, universities, and research centres to adopt the same tools for open education, research coordination, and transparent governance, ensuring that technology serves knowledge and inclusiveness rather than limiting them.

The next upcoming expansion will integrate massive open online courses (MOOCs) and associated educational platforms into the BEACON infrastructure to deliver training directly to learners and institutions across Europe and partner regions. This digital backbone maximizes the use of our pooled computing resources, supports continuous education, and transforms our open servers into the central hub of one health educational implementation. Through transparent governance, open collaboration, and collective innovation, EU BEACON One Health education via new technologies establishes the model for how Europe and its partners can coordinate knowledge, ethics, and technology to build a sustainable, equitable, and healthier future. Please, share the word. Repost at will this and all the materials made available. Invite to join in in this call for action. Thank you for being part of this network, of this, your action. Thanks again for all your help making this a reality.

I am wishing you all a great weekend.
Henning (né Enric) Garcia Torrents
EU BEACON scientific communications, dissemination and exploitation officer.

Element is our open communication and coordination platform, connected to the self-hosted Matrix server at our servers. It allows all members of the action to collaborate, organize missions, and plan the collective roadmap securely and transparently. The chat system is available via web browser, Android and iOS apps, plus full desktop applications. Registration is straightforward. Once inside, you can join the working-group rooms that correspond to your area of expertise or current interest. Members of this action are required to use Element to deliberate and prepare mission proposals in advance, ensuring coordination among institutions and alignment with the overall objectives of the action. These missions, as well as all other funded activities, are to be designed to strengthen the network, reinforce each participant’s capacities, and secure the effective achievement of all shared goals. For any request or issue to be addressed, please comment on this post.

The platform provides a space for collective refinement of ideas, allowing members to integrate institutional strengths, identify synergies, and distribute tasks efficiently. While coordinated proposals are prioritized to guarantee coherence and progress, the action remains fully open to new proposals from individual members and teams. Every constructive initiative that supports the vision and implementation of One Health education and collaboration is welcome.

On the other hand, as you also know, BigBlueButton (BBB) is our videoconferencing solution, available at https://tele.health.int.eu.org, soon to be integrated with our own classroom systems. BBB provides features designed for research and teaching meetings. Screen sharing for talks and demos. Presentation upload with slide navigation by the presenter or moderators. Shared notes for collaborative minute taking, exportable at the end of the session. Multi-user whiteboard with pointer and drawing tools over slides. Polls for quick decisions and temperature checks. Public and private chat inside the meeting. Multi-user moderation controls including mute, lock settings, and user roles. Breakout rooms for parallel work packages and subgroup discussions, with up to a thousand concurrent users at once divided in hundreds, at our current server capacity, bar any mistake in the reckoning. Tests are underway to check it all. Recording with automatic processing for later review could be enabled by the host on request. We are installing the extension to stream directly to Youtube live along the BBB session, allowing for multitudinous public without limits on our end.

The rest of the website announcement is deferred to late Friday 24th of October, to include additional capabilities, as well as more utilities, such as a conference organization suite. Among other additions, the network will also enjoy an automated feed of grant opportunities and publication calls that will be relayed into the appropriate Element rooms and Leantime tasks for timely action. This will further streamline coordination and enable rapid formation of new consortia. All named improvements in this post will be ready by that time, bar unforeseen force majeure circumstances affecting all work. The delay also reflects the parallel installation of our independent email system, which will provide secure and autonomous communication for the action. We appreciate your patience and understanding while these systems are finalized to deliver a robust and transparent operational infrastructure for all.

Please, anyone still not formally registered is invited to complete the membership form at http://health.int.eu.org/membership.html. We kindly ask to share widely on social medial and among trusted contacts in the EU COST area and third countries, to support the ongoing network strengthening efforts.

Executive summary: the complete open infrastructure supporting the EU BEACON One Health education network is now almost fully deployed and operational, integrating project management, participatory governance, encrypted communication and secure videoconferencing. Each system has been selected for transparency, accessibility, efficiency and long-term scientific and institutional sovereignty, following strict open science standards and criteria.

Please unsubscribe if not interested in receiving more such news. Next delivery on Friday the seventeenth of October.

The EU BEACON One Health education infrastructure now operates on two dedicated Ubuntu servers of exceptional performance, each with four terabytes of storage, thirty-two cores and one hundred twenty-eight gigabytes of RAM memory. These two physical machines together form a powerful and resilient backbone sustaining all our digital environments. The total cost of this infrastructure is barely one hundred euros per month, yet it delivers computational capacity equivalent to that of large institutional systems that consume hundreds of times more resources. This is possible because the entire architecture is open source, efficiently configured and maintained with full control over every layer of operation.

Such efficiency proves that digital sovereignty and high performance are not a privilege but a matter of design and responsibility. By investing in autonomy rather than in licences and intermediaries, we obtain continuous access to our tools and data without restriction, interruption or hidden cost. The servers support in real time the platforms for communication, videoconferencing, participatory governance, research coordination and project management, ensuring that collaboration flows as naturally and constantly as running water. They are always on, always available, allowing teaching, research, implementation and policy development to advance without delay.

This approach redefines what public infrastructure in science and education should be: lean, transparent, accessible and permanently operational. It shows that the core resources of a global network can be maintained at minimal expense while offering a level of reliability and speed previously accessible only to large institutions. Our servers stand as a statement of principle as much as a technical achievement: essential as water, they make participation continuous, open and equitable, empowering every member to contribute meaningfully at any moment from any place.

This infrastructure readies us to operate at scale, sustaining the coordinated work of thousands of participants across countries, disciplines and institutions. It provides the solid foundation required for a network of continental dimension, where teaching, research, implementation and governance can unfold in parallel without constraint. The capacity of our servers allows for simultaneous use by large numbers of members, ensuring stability and speed even under intensive workloads. It transforms what used to be exceptional coordination into a normal daily practice.

This readiness is crucial. The challenges addressed by the one health framework demand participation from a vast community of experts, educators, students and decision-makers. Our system makes such cooperation possible, efficient and sustainable. The ability to operate continuously at this scale means that every idea, initiative or project can immediately find a place in the shared structure, tested, improved and implemented without delay. In practice, this is the technological backbone of a true European network of excellence in formation, capable of growing organically as more teams join, expanding both reach and capability with minimal cost and maximum transparency.

It follows a breakdown of our software infrastructure:

Leantime is a behavioral-science-based project management suite explicitly designed for teams with diverse cognitive profiles. Its architecture integrates visual planning, narrative task framing and goal-oriented progress tracking to optimize executive function, motivation and clarity. Developed by a neurodivergent-led team, Leantime promotes inclusion by accommodating non-linear thinking and varied attention patterns, crucial in academic and creative work environments.

The platform’s adoption within EU BEACON ensures accessibility, inclusivity and accountability in managing tasks, milestones and cross-institutional deliverables. Unlike conventional systems, it values different cognitive strengths, enhancing team coherence and ethical productivity. Every project, from educational module design to policy mapping, is transparently traceable, supporting evidence-based management across the entire network.

The Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform has also been fully deployed. Initially developed by the Crowdsourced Democracy Team at Stanford University, it has supported participatory budgeting in major cities such as New York, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and Reykjavík, as well as in numerous universities and regional governments. The platform is now adapted to serve as the governance backbone of EU BEACON, ensuring every decision and financial allocation is democratically validated and publicly auditable.

All expenditures, priorities and project proposals within the action will be open to member evaluation and voting. This model reverses the opacity typical of many research structures, where funds often vanish into administrative inefficiency. Here, euros will be accounted for transparently, each decision publicly justified. In doing so, EU BEACON establishes a model of integrity: one where democratic participation replaces managerial secrecy and where community oversight replaces hierarchical gatekeeping. We are testing both internally, before opening up registration. We will send invites to everyone subscribed to this newsletter, and everyone you tell us by the comments or the action membership official site form.

We also encourage you to create a profile at eCOST, to facilitate the invitation to that platform, in case of not being already a member: https://health.int.eu.org/membership.html

Tests on Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform and Leantime will be running for the next few days at these URLs, respectively: https://triage.health.int.eu.org, and https://tasks.health.int.eu.org. The new EU BEACON website will make navigating the services easier. We will also arrange videocalls to go through how each works, and publish tutorials to ease any learning curve, once all is ready by the end of next week.

Matrix Element is the secure, decentralized collaboration system now running on our servers. It employs the open Matrix protocol with end-to-end encryption and federation capabilities, granting full control over data, identities and communications. Governmental agencies such as the French State, the German Federal Armed Forces, and the UK National Health Service have adopted Matrix precisely for these attributes: independence from commercial surveillance, resilience, and legal compliance under European privacy frameworks.

EU BEACON employs Matrix Element to unify communication across working groups and partner institutions, allowing for private, verified, and permanent channels for collaboration. Users can download the Element app from Google Play or Apple’s App Store, or access desktop versions for Windows, macOS and Linux from element.io. Registration at our portal grants immediate access to structured chat rooms for introductions, mentorship, onboarding and technical coordination.

Our client is available at https://element.health.int.eu.org/, you can already register and start using the server through it, as well as the desktop and mobile applications.

BigBlueButton videoconferencing operates at https://tele.health.int.eu.org/show/tell/ with capacity for over one thousand concurrent participants, divided into rooms of eighty to one hundred fifty users each. Built specifically for education and research environments, BigBlueButton provides interactive tools such as shared whiteboards, polls, breakout sessions and multi-user collaboration.

It is the only open-source videoconferencing suite natively optimized for teaching, supporting deep integration with Moodle, Open edX and other academic platforms. Governments, universities and public institutions worldwide, including the French Ministry of Education, the Canadian government and the German public research infrastructure, use BigBlueButton for its security, scalability and autonomy. Unlike commercial systems, no user data leaves our control. Recordings remain encrypted and fully owned by the community.

The new site and full suite of software, releasing next Friday, will integrate new media kit assets, scheduling tools, surveys, translation services, geographic information modules and collaborative programming environments. It will also include new funding calls in the collective deadline calendar, including the next Horizon round for consortia formation. All deployed software is open source, modular, and federated under the same principles of transparency and autonomy. Strict adherence to open science standards is not only a matter of ethics but of operational efficiency and scientific validity. Open systems prevent dependency on opaque proprietary software, guarantee data reproducibility and long-term sustainability, and ensure that all research, educational and technical contributions remain verifiable, improvable and publicly accountable.

By controlling every layer, from infrastructure to application, EU BEACON ensures data sovereignty, reduces costs dramatically and channels all savings into expanding the scope of its educational and scientific missions. Each deployment and each local improvement adds value not only to our network but to the broader global commons. In this model, science is no longer confined within institutional walls. Knowledge becomes an evolving infrastructure, collectively maintained and shared. The network stands as a living demonstration that efficiency, transparency and democracy are compatible with high scientific standards.

As for the outreach ongoing: more than one hundred sixty thousand relevant media professionals, journalists, educators, policymakers and organizations are being prepared, awaiting for the initial communication and outreach effort. This first coordinated campaign will launch across the entire region of the COST framework, encompassing forty-one full member countries with complete rights to participate and receive full funding, one cooperating member country, Israel, with access to participation and partial funding, one partner member country, South Africa, with observer status and limited funding access, and fourteen near neighbour countries, including Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, with eligibility to participate in activities and receive reimbursement for their contributions. Together they represent a broad community of practice extending across Europe, the Mediterranean and neighbouring regions, where collaboration and openness are essential for real progress.

The campaign aims to strengthen awareness of our shared mission and invite participation from key stakeholders, potential new members and allies. Each is encouraged to join national teams, working groups and leadership clusters to help implement the programme region by region. This marks the transition from infrastructure readiness to coordinated collective action, enabling the network to grow organically through engagement, trust and active participation.

Our communication systems are ready, and the outbound email service will be completed shortly with the final access approval. Once operational, it will allow transparent and secure outreach to partners and institutions worldwide. The campaign will invite participation through concise messages and through visual material, including introductory videos available at

https://www.youtube.com/@onehealthedtech

As said, a new version of the central site will be released along the rest of the services not yet running, or still in testing stage. It will include a complete media kit, a calendar with deadlines, shared scheduling tools to arrange meetings and group sessions, collaborative survey instruments, translation services, geographic information resources and open programming environments. All are freely available to facilitate participation, planning and knowledge exchange.

Every resource in this infrastructure is open source and compliant with the most rigorous open data and open science standards. This is a strategic necessity rather than a technical preference. It guarantees transparency, reproducibility and trust while ensuring that no component of our work depends on private interests or opaque systems. By maintaining full control of the technological stack, we preserve scientific sovereignty, reduce costs and reinvest savings into the research, education and community-building that sustain our mission.

Each improvement made to this shared environment, each contribution of code, translation or coordination tool, becomes a public good. These collective gains strengthen our capacity to educate, research and govern ethically, connecting schools, laboratories and communities beyond local boundaries. Open infrastructure is therefore not only a means of work but a statement of values: knowledge must remain accessible, transparent and in service of the public good.

Please adopt and use the platform widely, share it with your colleagues and collaborators, and report back any needs or suggestions that may help refine and expand our shared systems. The strength of this effort depends on mutual participation and collective improvement. Thank you for being part of the action.

I end up this long post with my most honest best wishes of a great week ahead to all colleagues, partners, allies and friends contributing to this shared endeavour. Every step we take together strengthens the structure we are building and moves us closer to the vision of a more transparent, ethical and cooperative scientific community, and proper one health education being a reality to empower children to ensure a prosperous future, as urgently needed. It took years of bloody effort to get here, under brutal violence. To some of our members, it was even worse. Let’s get it done, now we have the backing and funds to make it all a reality, ensure safety and health for all, despite the chaos and violence, the brutality ranging all over around us still.

My apologies for the delay in deploying it all, and kicking off our action as needed.

Henning (né Enric) Garcia Torrents (it/those, the dehumanized other)
Scientific communications, dissemination and exploitation officer

As outlined earlier this summer, we will facilitate the recording of short formula videos for every participant. The system will integrate with LeanTime and the Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform, a late but significant addition to our technological stack. This integration will enable transparent polling, collective selection processes, and enhanced collaboration through openness and shared intelligence.

Summary: this post announces the imminent publication of new videos on the project’s website and YouTube channel, inviting members to communicate the urgency of the initiative in their own words. It outlines the establishment of democratic, open-source governance systems to ensure transparency, shared decision-making, and responsible management of the project’s funding, estimated at nearly three-quarters of a million euros. Two main open-source infrastructures are already functional: LibreTranslate, for extensive document translation, and BigBlueButton (BBB), for videoconferencing and collaborative education, adopted also by the French Ministry of Education. The text calls participants to assist in testing and improving these systems toward integration in schools and universities. It emphasizes sustainability, proper compensation for contributors, and the expansion of the network through engagement of skilled undergraduates, rough outlining the path ahead for the action network to be successful, sustainable, always improving.

More videos will soon be available here, on the main Action website, and on YouTube, to facilitate sharing and outreach. I invite every member to speak in their own words, conveying the urgency of addressing the challenges before us with the highest professional competence. Our collective strength lies not only in our numbers, but in the depth of our expertise, our commitment, and our determination across every region. https://health.int.eu.org/membership.html

It is an honor to be establishing fully democratic, open-source systems of governance and organization that guarantee every decision and every action belongs to the entire Action, never to a few hands. Each proposal will be openly discussed and subject to transparent voting. Every euro of the nearly three-quarters-of-a-million budget will be carefully valued and directed toward missions with measurable impact, shared with pride regardless of difficulty or outcome. This work is not meant to be easy, for many cling to their entrenched ways as if sacred, defending their normalcy with zeal. Despite the harshest setbacks, we are building a strong, cohesive, and truly excellent working network, one that protects its members, uplifts those in greatest need, and advances from schools upward toward a future of safety, prosperity, and genuine health for all, lived in peace.

By Monday, more videos will be available on our channel. Please share them widely. The website will also be updated, with all systems operational and continuously improving. New calls for consortium-based funding will soon open to support every working-group task. None of this will rely on voluntary labor alone. Sustainability, professional recognition, and fair reward are essential. Hard, honest work will be acknowledged, as we uphold the highest standards of open science together. We invite all to join in, contribute. Extend the invitation for everyone, all, to be part of this work.

Two core services are already active. LibreTranslate offers long-form translations for all members. We will contribute to this and all software solutions we implement, with the funds from the COST action, and further grants and income, from consortia and spin offs. This effort needs to be providing to all. For now, large text files remain the best option for extensive documents. This is one of the many shared resources we will continue to refine for global access, in gratitude to the few dedicated developers whose open-source work benefits us all: https://trans.health.int.eu.org/

BigBlueButton (BBB) is our videoconferencing platform, open-source, robust, and also adopted by the French Ministry of Education. We, too, are the trailblazers and the vanguard of this movement. I invite everyone to take pride in that role and to assist in testing and improving the system. Hundreds of funded missions will soon advance this effort. Our aim is clear: to make open-source educational and collaboration tools, videoconferencing, tutoring support, and classroom group systems, default installations in every school. None of this exceeds our reach; we simply need more colleagues to join us, including the best among our undergraduates who wish to contribute meaningfully: https://tele.health.int.eu.org/show/tell

Thank you. It is a profound honor to stand at the forefront of developing and implementing the new curricula on One health across the entire EU COST area, thereby enabling its adoption worldwide. This achievement rests on the dedication of our allies and members, each contributing with full commitment according to their capacities and circumstances. The action now calls for more leaders, for working groups to be established at every hub of responsibility. Such distributed strength is essential, ensuring that progress does not depend on the goodwill or ability of a few, but on the coordinated effort of all. Together we support, empower, and reinforce one another. Please, be patient for just a few more days. Every member will soon receive an invitation to join the new governance platform, progressively and inclusively. This marks another decisive step toward our shared goal: one health, for and with all.

Summary: the EU BEACON One Health Education COST action is entering its funded four-year phase to advance education, science, and technology for health. We are expanding membership now across the COST region and beyond, aiming for a thousands-strong, fully engaged network ready for launch. Over the coming years we will deliver mentoring, funded missions, required open source tools, open course-ware, it all while ensuring the implementation of one health curricula in the schools of the European Union and beyond. In the next weeks we will introduce our open governance system and collaborative project management suite, alongside a major media launch. We invite you to join and share this call with trusted colleagues and networks: https://health.int.eu.org/membership.html

The EU BEACON One Health Education COST Action is entering its decisive growth phase. Over the next four years our network will be funded to advance education, science, and technology for health through collaborative missions, open knowledge, and cross-sector engagement. To succeed we must expand strategically right now, reaching across the entire COST region and beyond, building a thousands-strong membership that is fully operational and engaged from the start.

We invite you not only to join but also to share this call widely with your colleagues, trusted specialists, and professional networks. Post it on your social media, forward it to your mailing lists, and help us grow stronger together. Every new member strengthens our collective ability to shape impactful proposals, achieve ambitious goals, and sustain our careers. Over the next four years the network will deliver:

• Mentoring and funded scientific missions to connect and empower researchers at all stages
• Development of open source tools for health and education, ensuring transparent and ethical innovation
• Creation of open courseware to support teachers, students, and professionals with high quality accessible resources
• Implementation of new One Health curricula EU wide and globally, embedding the interconnected approach to human, animal, and environmental health in education systems

This is way more than a simple network, it is a major, officially backed, collective action-research undertaking to create a long lasting, sustainable and truly impactful structure of excellence, based on equity values and the best open science standards. It is as urgent as it gets to accomplish our mandate, helping children become skilled and aware, ready to tackle current global crisis. By expanding now before the official launch we ensure that our network is ready to act with full capacity, diversity, and strength from day one. Please apply to join today and share with your trusted colleagues: https://health.int.eu.org/membership.html

In the next few weeks we will also be sharing our internal governance system, based on Consul Democracy (https://demo.health.int.eu.org), which will allow all members to participate directly in decision making, scientific mission proposals’ open review and voting, and collective debates. Alongside this we are rolling out our work groups project management suite, based on LeanTime (https://github.com/Leantime/leantime), providing a transparent and collaborative platform to plan, track, and deliver tasks across the network. Both systems are open source and customized specifically for our action, ensuring that our governance and project management reflect the principles of openness, fairness, and inclusivity.

Invitations to several events to help us all organize and get used to the systems, along with a meeting with Consul Democracy developers, will be shared soon. We are also preparing a major media launch with a new media kit, including a presentation video and a complete rehaul of our website where these systems will be fully integrated. This will give members and partners a clear view of how we work, how they can engage, and how together we can achieve the ambitious goals of the action. Invite colleagues, refer trusted experts, and share this call in your networks.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) has launched a call for expressions of interest to appoint 15 members to the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change for its second term (2026–2030). This is a high-level opportunity for senior scholars and researchers across the EU COST area to take on leadership roles in shaping Europe’s climate governance, with explicit attention to gender balance, geographical diversity, and inclusion of experts from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The EEA, as the EU’s authoritative source of environmental intelligence, provides rigorous scientific analysis and guidance to support policy and public awareness. The Advisory Board operates independently from governments and institutions, offering expert advice on EU climate targets, policy coherence with the Paris Agreement, and strategies to accelerate mitigation and adaptation.

Key details:

• Term: four years (March 2026 – March 2030)

• Commitment: approx. 20% of a full-time equivalent

• Remuneration: €400 per meeting day, plus allowance for preparation; travel and subsistence covered

• Eligibility: PhD or equivalent, minimum 10 years’ relevant professional experience, EU nationality

• Balance: gender and geographical balance central to the selection process

• Deadline: 15 September 2025, 23:59 CET

• Application: Europass CV and motivation letter to applications.advisoryboard@eea.europa.eu

For full details on eligibility, selection criteria, time commitment, compensation, and application guidance, consult the official call here:

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/about/key-partners/eu-partners/call-for-expression-of-interest-for-members-of-the-european-scientific-advisory-board-on-climate-change

This is a unique opportunity for EU BEACON members with the required expertise to contribute directly to high-level climate governance in Europe. This leadership opportunity aligns with our mission to support inclusive scientific engagement and leadership across Europe. Please, encourage colleagues with the required expertise to consider this call.

In parallel, our action is also seeking new leaders from across the EU COST area to join us before the official launch next month. We especially encourage applications from women and experts with disadvantaged backgrounds to take on national and pan-action leadership roles, strengthening our shared capacity to deliver inclusive and transformative science and education. Learn more and apply here: https://health.int.eu.org/membership.html

At the moment, we are preparing to send invitations to experts across the EU COST area to expand and consolidate our network. A new website is about to be launched, integrating transparent participatory tools for open review of budget, scientific missions, and all action decisions. These will include democratic voting, planning, and debate features based on the Consul Democracy system, which can already be explored in a live demonstration at https://demo.health.int.eu.org. In parallel, a media kit is under preparation, with a new introductory video scheduled for release as part of next month’s major media campaign, coinciding with the official launch of the action.

Thank you for reading. We will soon notify about an online meeting on the system implementation, the administration of the action, the presentation of new leaders, and the EU BEACON official launch event itself.

Executive summary: the upcoming EU BEACON video-call today, Friday 8 August at 11:00 CEST, will bring together partners preparing a Horizon Europe proposal on brain health. The session will focus on clarifying institutional roles, consolidating interdisciplinary cooperation, and ensuring alignment with policy frameworks and strategic goals. This initiative places One Health education at the centre of preventive brain health, linking nutrition, pedagogy and systemic support to protect cognitive development. The proposal addresses the structural causes of neurodevelopmental disparities and contributes directly to the sustainable development goals. The video-call represents a key step in strengthening the network’s operational readiness and scientific positioning. If you wish, you are invited to join the video-call:

https://meet.google.com/ydn-veye-rbi

The upcoming coordination video-call on Friday 8 August at 11:00 CEST marks a strategic step in the formation of a Horizon Europe partnership on brain health, framed within our action network strenghtening. This initiative addresses the urgent need to intervene early in the determinants of cognitive function and mental well-being, embedding brain health promotion within educational, nutritional, and clinical systems. Grounded in the one health and embodied mind paradigms, the proposal aims to integrate metabolic psychiatry, developmental neuroscience and public pedagogy into a unified framework that strengthens lifelong health trajectories and enhances neurocognitive performance from childhood through ageing.

Nutritional interventions, microbiome modulation and lifestyle-based metabolic regulation are emerging as essential components of both early prevention and sustained recovery, shifting psychiatric care toward precision and physiological grounding. Current evidence highlights that targeting metabolic dysfunction, particularly insulin resistance, mitochondrial stress and neuroinflammation, yields measurable improvements in cognitive function, mood stability and overall mental health. By aligning preventive strategies across sectors, the partnership responds to the structural origins of neurodevelopmental inequities, linking school environments, nutritional quality, and early emotional safety to long-term brain integrity. The inclusion of metabolic markers, gut-brain axis modulation, and inflammatory profiling positions the project at the frontier of translational science, while its emphasis on education ensures accessibility, scalability and public accountability. All Member States and associated countries stand to benefit from the evidence-based tools, data infrastructure and institutional reforms that this partnership will develop and disseminate.

The video-call will serve to finalise roles, consolidate institutional commitments, and expand engagement with ministries, research bodies and frontline services. It is a moment of operational convergence, where scientific excellence and societal impact must align to secure funding and deliver tangible improvements in health equity, systemic resilience, and EU-level leadership in brain health governance.

Join the video-call on Friday 8 August at 11:00 CEST
https://meet.google.com/ydn-veye-rbi

This integrative approach is directly aligned with several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It supports SDG 2 on ending hunger by emphasising the role of adequate and high-quality nutrition in cognitive development. It contributes to SDG 3 on good health and well-being by promoting early metabolic regulation as a cornerstone of mental and neurological integrity. Through school-based implementation and the redesign of pedagogical environments around cognitive safety, it advances SDG 4 on quality education. By prioritising structurally marginalised populations and ensuring equitable access to preventive interventions, it addresses SDG 10 on reducing inequality. By fostering coordinated scientific, educational and institutional collaboration, it reinforces SDG 17 on partnerships for the goals. The EU BEACON One Health Education COST action serves as the operational platform to translate these principles into measurable impact, supporting member initiatives that bring together public authorities, researchers, educators and clinicians. The proposed Horizon Europe partnership builds on this foundation to establish brain health as a shared public responsibility and a strategic priority for sustainable development across the European Research Area.

Executive summary: with nearly 6,500 unique visitors this past month, our network’s visibility is growing rapidly. We are now deploying WhatsApp and Telegram chatbots, issuing official institutional email addresses (@health.int.eu.org), and preparing to expand our membership by another few thousand experts by the end of the month. A coordination meeting is planned for next week, specific to support an Horizon brain health call consortium ongoing. We encourage all members to invite colleagues, especially from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds, as we work to build a more resilient and inclusive action.

We are pleased to share encouraging data from the past 30 days: nearly 6,500 unique visitors accessed our EU BEACON One Health Education network official website, reflecting growing interest and international engagement with our work. This expanding visibility underscores the urgency and relevance of our collective mission:

In the coming weeks, we will deploy secure chat-bot interfaces via Telegram and WhatsApp to facilitate real-time interaction, coordination, and access to resources. All registered members will soon be eligible to receive official institutional email accounts using the domain @health.int.eu.org, either as full inboxes or forwarding aliases, depending on individual preference. Frequently asked questions and other sections will be added to the site, along with a media kit to support the launching campaign next month, covering all press and other outlets across the EU COST area and globally. Our priority remains to consolidate a robust, operationally effective and ethically grounded network, stronger, welcoming and supporting experts from diverse regions and disciplines, with particular commitment to young professionals and members from historically marginalized communities. We call on all current members to extend invitations within their trusted circles, especially to those from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds.

Our next coordination meeting is scheduled for next week, with full details available at the conclusion of the following linked post:

Lab and fieldwork open science notes on acuity & resilience

Hatred is not care: on the crimes endured, and the duty to act

Reading time: 8–10 minutes…

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8 months ago · Henning Garcia Torrents

Please share this update within your all your other networks and contacts. We welcome all suggestions or contributions. Thank you for your continued commitment. The next full briefing will be issued by the end of next week. No more posts will be sent until then. Apologies for bothering during vacations to all enjoying the chance.

Shared chairs workshop and action launch: we thank professor María Jesús Lirola, our chair, for attending the official COST chairs workshop in Brussels last week, where key procedural elements and timelines were clarified. We happily announce she reached safe, and all is going from good to better; all good news. The action officially kicks off in October, marking the beginning of the four-year implementation period. Funds are secured in her institution, Universidad de Almería. Work is ongoing for our network to span all over the COST area countries by that time. Full membership will ensure higher impact and access to the full funding endowed to bigger, most complete and deserving action networks.

Horizon Europe proposals, participation urgently needed now: next week we will be sharing full draft proposals and further participation requirements for our current Horizon Europe submissions. These projects are entering the decisive stage, and we must ensure institutional engagement, schools, practitioners, researchers, and national partners fully on board to ensure the success we all want. Remember to all that may want in, we need principal investigators and the best possible partners.

The current main proposals are:

• Fostering brain health in school settings: exercise, sports, sleep, nutrition and supplements for cognitive performance and top acuity, remediation, protection. Health for success. This project targets the foundations of neurocognitive and emotional resilience through structured, measurable routines in physical activity, rest, social engagement and nutrition—placing emphasis on Omega-3 levels and metabolic balance as early interventions. This is key for learning and emotional regulation, and deeply connected with fair and inclusive school-based health.

• Pollutants and brain health: cleaner air, soil, water and food chains, for cognitive performance, acuity and all damage prevention. This proposal focuses on the reduction of exposure to environmental neurotoxins across urban and rural areas. It links environmental justice with educational equity, and prepares scalable strategies to mitigate damage already ongoing in school-age populations.

• Shared decision making mental health for children: best practices in mental health pedagogy and responsible shared action through education and relational systems of care. Designed to replace fragmented and coercive approaches with community-rooted that place children, teachers, carers, schools and families at the center. Aimed at reversing the alarming rise of mental distress among youth through systems of trust, continuity, and local anchoring.

• Service-learning internal mentorship programs: responsibility and institutional peer support. This project activates relational networks of learning and care inside schools and adjacent services. It responds to the systemic absence of constructive learning, socialisation and counseling in school settings by formalising internal mentorship as a pathway to meaning, contribution, and institutional change. A perennial open invitation to share on abuses suffered, end all harming conflicts, and promote health.

These are all set to be longitudinal, interlinked, and anchored in the One Health framework, building from our goals into actionable scientific action-research. Each extends the principles of decision science, healthy behavioural systems, and open democratic governance, applied and taught in context. Each one is a building block toward the world we are co-creating: peaceful, restorative, protective, informed by evidence, and humanely run. Participation is our responsibility: please, get involved.Institutions, professionals, and members committed to these goals are called now to step forward. Please, reach out to allies, bring only the best in.

These Horizon proposals directly advance multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs), including SDG 3, good health and well-being, SDG 4, quality education), SDG 5, gender equality, and SDG 13, climate action, while strengthening democratic practice through participatory, open, and ethically structured systems, fully aligned with our strategic goals to build the knowledge, the systems, and the human environments where safe and healthy children thrive, where science, care, and rights-based participation are taught, lived and protected.

Regional and thematic leadership: all action members are now encouraged to take initiative in proposing and leading regional and thematic teams. These structures will coordinate sub-actions and joint efforts, enabling decentralised leadership and strengthening collaboration across domains. Please invite trusted experts, particularly responsible young talent from underserved areas, women, and allies from schools, communities, and public institutions. Engagement of national and local governments is welcome, we are already working on that front, and your support is essential to make the action a success.

Communication and media strategy: no main nor any media and external networks communications will be made before October. Please, restrain and contact straight the top trusted experts of your choice in all domains required. Until then, all updates remain internal. Media kits are being prepared to help members reach national channels when the time comes. Any public announcements, interviews, or posts must be coordinated in advance. For these matters, and to express interest in leading or contributing to strategic projects, please contact Henning Garcia, communications, dissemination and exploitation officer. Please send your expressions of interest to join existing proposals or initiate new ones, to henning.garcia@urv.cat.

Transparency and infrastructure: further details will also follow soon regarding the transparency and accountability protocols, adapting and deploying only full free open source resources, hosted on our dedicated action server along with other required infrastructure. The architecture will follow a minimalist structure, ensuring best decision science practices, streamlining all process, ensuring full transparency. We will most likely be using a customized Discourse instance including voting and open peer review for any and all important proposals. All proposals reviews and decisions involving funds or strategic shifts will be managed there, as part of our internal communication framework and governance standards.

This first software release will lead ad support our next educational and care tools required, such as the expert carer-tutor system, and other tools such as habit forming and conflict resolution and decision making ones, to teach and learn long-term shared responsibility. We remind you we will also soon be also opening for scientific missions funded by our own action, on top of the bigger action-research consortia we are setting up on a regular basis. We appreciate your patience as we finalise systems and consolidate priorities for immediate collective action.

Young researchers group: following the Brussels workshop recommendations, an under 40 years group will be established as part of the internal structure of the action. This will co-organize international, national and regions peace contests, support engagement, ensure shared responsibility and long-term knowledge exchange, including the facilitation of dedicated mentorship from senior, elder expert members, as well as laying down capacity-building pathways across disciplines globally. All interested members are encouraged to express their interest in joining by submitting a short video presentation and a letter of interest, as described in earlier posts.

The key prompts remain: what do you do, how was the journey here, why, and what do you envision as next steps? We now repost old news with the instructions and link to our streaming channel, already with over 20,000 subscribers, to assist new members in disseminating their work, be screened, selected and engaged.

Please, send us your videos, engagements and any relevant message on the ongoing to henning.garcia@urv.cat. No other channel is now open for official communication, as we work to set it all up. Wishing you health and success, a strong start to this summer.

The structure is now fully active again, following a period of disruption caused by unacceptable power struggles, opportunistic interference, and sabotage attempts. Mismanagement and breakdown of honest engagement following the COST funding award required immediate intervention. We thank all members who acted to prevent further harm, and particularly Professor María Jesús Lirola for her decisive containment and principled leadership. Members are reminded to report all threats or breaches of trust. Silence is not an option.


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Internal and external communications:

The EU BEACON One Health Education COST Action is not symbolic. It is operational. COST provides an institutional platform for coordination, but it is our responsibility to determine the scope, direction, and legitimacy of this network. Every action, vote, proposal, and role will be registered, peer-reviewed, and subject to traceable governance without obstructing streamlined workflows. Informal hierarchies, manipulation, and malevolent influence have no place here. Strict compliance is mandatory. No access to COST mobility, action funding, or full participation will be granted without adherence to our shared values and the completion of a verified member profile. This includes a short recorded video, curriculum vitae, motivation letter, and reliable references. These are not administrative formalities but foundational components of trust, transparency, and operational fairness. They are also required for participation in open peer review, transparent proposal submissions, and auditable funding procedures.

The member video must answer four simple questions, posed from a child’s perspective:

1. What do you do

2. How did you get here

3. What are you working on next

4. Why does it matter to children around the world

These are not promotional exercises. They are relational, diagnostic, and part of our scientific and educational dissemination effort. They also serve as materials for public engagement, school-based collaborations, and visibility across sectors. We provide full technical and peer support to ensure all members, regardless of background, can comply. Shyness is not a problem. Inactivity without justification is.

This process also helps us identify early career researchers and senior colleagues who require support. All applications, proposals, and funding decisions will undergo open peer review. All discretionary decisions will be voted upon transparently. No informal decisions will be allowed. No hidden hierarchies will be tolerated. No plausible deniability will be accepted. All activities will be timestamped, auditable, and governed by an open-source infrastructure designed for long-term replication and collective accountability. We are finalising national COST teams in every participating country. All members are expected to identify capable, ethical professionals for inclusion. The aim is to construct balanced, representative, and fully active national nodes that reflect the diversity and excellence of our network. Please mobilise your networks accordingly. All are welcome, if aligned and prepared.

Please, mobilize your own networks. All welcomed in. If you are ready to lead, contribute, protect, and support this structure with clarity, truthfulness, and responsibility, make yourself known now. To engage directly or nominate others, contact henning.garcia@urv.cat.

Dissemination:

The foundation of One Health Education is not content delivery. It is the ethical configuration of knowledge production, dissemination, and governance. Our infrastructure includes the following elements. Verified member profiles and institutional affiliations, serving both scientific visibility and trust-building. A transparent open-source interface for collective decision-making. Activity heatmaps and dashboards to visualise participation and identify imbalances. Digital records of votes, contributions, amendments, and authorship. Open peer-review systems across proposals, outputs, and communications.

These are not optional, nor aesthetic features. They are functional necessities. Global collaboration requires open systems. Our tools are being designed to be adaptable to school curricula, scientific and engineering education, and democratic decision-making in organisational contexts. These systems are themselves educational and financial tools. They will serve as part of our income strategy. Our infrastructure teaches by doing. It enforces integrity, prevents abuse, and models reproducibility.

Dissemination will also include open educational content across member countries. Training will be aligned with our core areas: decision science, health systems, sustainable development goals, and action-research methods. This is what One Health Education means. We teach not abstractions but systems, not rhetoric but practical implementation. All members are encouraged to propose dissemination activities, including participatory workshops, theater, music, sport, scientific games, software development, citizen science modules, open courseware, and integrative curricula.

Again, email henning.garcia@urv.cat for any proposal, for the time being, while we set our full systems within the action domain.

Exploitation:

The Horizon Europe proposals under development are not conceptual drafts. They are applied strategies responding to systemic failure, grounded in empirical observation, transdisciplinary research, and lived experience. Four proposals are in final consolidation for submission by 16 September 2025. Contributions must be confirmed by July.

1. Mental health in education: integration of mental health as a structural axis of childhood and adolescent development. Frameworks for curriculum, teacher training, and support ecosystems will promote peak performance and resilience. This is not reactive care or minimal thresholds but the foundation of equitable flourishing.

2. Environmental impacts on brain health: this Horizon call, The impact of pollution on the development and progression of brain diseases and disorders, addresses neurotoxic exposures. We focus on the early life stage, at-risk populations, and high-impact zones, including war, disaster, and abandonment, with full policy and health system integration.

3. Brain health in school settings: an holistic intervention model including structured physical activity, optimal nutrition, micronutrient supplementation, community reinforcement, and psychosocial support. This aligns One Health principles with direct implementation in school and public health systems.

4. Service learning and civic responsibility in education: education as the formation of character and public responsibility. Young people will co-design responses to social challenges with mentorship, responsibility-building, and intergenerational learning. Apprenticeship and action-research will form the basis for evaluation and reform.

Before proposing yourself as member or leader of any new consortia, please remember that the action does not benefit financially from participation in these projects. We do not manage reputations. We build solutions. All progress is documented. All success is shared as public knowledge, contributing to our common success as a network and foundation for One Health Education. EU BEACON action works to become, in the near future, an European Flagship, setting new standards in aligning education and health to prevent conflict, restore institutional trust, and generate durable global capacity. We need these collective success, and we work as hard as humanly possible to help out. Each proposal demands participation. This includes drafting, leadership, pilot site implementation, partnership development, and field alignment. Those who obstruct, misrepresent, or fail to contribute will be excluded. Those ready to lead or propose new initiatives will be supported across all open calls. The goals require, the children globally is in direst need of our shared success in completing our mandate.

Strategic clarification:

The four years of COST funding and active support represent a critical opportunity. This is an institutional gateway and coordination platform of immense strategic value. But to be a COST Action is not the objective. It is a means to achieve more. It is an enabling momentum. This action was conceived, led, and built to extend far beyond the constraints of COST in scope, ambition, and operational mandate.

We lead a network of global reach, not confined to the COST area but strengthened by it as a foundational base. It is now our responsibility to consolidate a structural, financial, and legal foundation that sustains the transformation we were established to deliver. The urgency of the harms we address, the lives at stake, and the scale of reform required globally demand us to set income streams, partnerships, and institutional capacity that surpass what COST alone can offer. To hesitate now would be to squander the opportunity and betray the mandate entrusted to us.

References:

COST. (2023a). Annotated rules for COST Actions. European Cooperation in Science and Technology. https://www.cost.eu/uploads/2023/03/COST-094-21-Annotated-Rules-for-COST-Actions-Level-C-March-2023.pdf
COST. (2023b). Memorandum of understanding (MoU) template for COST Actions. European Cooperation in Science and Technology. https://www.cost.eu/funding/how-to-get-funding/documents-and-guidelines/
COST. (2023c). Grant awarding user guide. European Cooperation in Science and Technology. https://www.cost.eu/uploads/2023/03/Grant-Awarding-User-Guide.pdf
COST. (2024). COST strategy: Excellence and inclusiveness in research and innovation networks. European Cooperation in Science and Technology. https://www.cost.eu/strategy/
IASC. (2024). Humanitarian action for children: Global trends and needs. Inter-Agency Standing Committee. https://www.unicef.org/media/149906/file/Humanitarian-Action-for-Children-2024-Overview.pdf
OCHA. (2024). Global humanitarian overview 2024. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. https://gho.unocha.org
UNDRR. (2023). Global assessment report on disaster risk reduction 2023: Our world at risk. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. https://www.undrr.org/gar2023
UNHCR. (2024). Global trends: Forced displacement in 2023. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends
UNICEF. (2023). Child displacement: 2023 overview and trends. United Nations Children’s Fund. https://www.unicef.org/reports/child-displacement-2023
UNICEF. (2024). The State of the World’s Children 2024: For every child, every right in a changing climate. United Nations Children’s Fund. https://www.unicef.org/reports/state-worlds-children-2024
World Bank. (2022). Groundswell Part 2: Acting on internal climate migration. The World Bank Group. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36248

Quick summary: This post recognises the leadership of Drs. Clara Richard and Funmilola Oluwafemi in the fields of space medicine, human resilience, and planetary stewardship. Thanks them for having considered top leadership positions. It reflects on their respective trajectories and their potential to shape the future of One Health across extreme environments, including the biosphere, outer space, and the neglected ecological and ethical frontiers of Earth. We thank them for considering taking the helm of this global educational and research action.

Dr. Funmilola Oluwafemi is the Chief Scientific Officer at Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), specialising in space life sciences, microgravity research, and astrobiology. A NASA GeneLab contributor and UNOOSA collaborator, she is also the founder of Funafo Innovations, promoting education and research opportunities for women and youth in STEM across Africa.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clararichard/

Dr. Clara Richard is Co-Founder and CEO of NeurAstra, and Researcher & Science Communicator at P/Twain, where she leads projects on human adaptation to extreme environments. Her interdisciplinary work bridges space medicine, user experience, and planetary health, advancing science communication and design in high-stakes settings.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-funmilola-oluwafemi-0026bb251/

We are honored, and extend our deepest gratitude, to both space medicine doctors for being part of the EU BEACON One Health Education COST action, and for having generously considered taking on top leadership roles within the action. Their vision, integrity, and scientific excellence embody the principles this global effort stands for rigour, responsibility, and the unwavering pursuit of a healthier, more just and prepared planetary future. In a world teetering between irreversible damage and renewed hope, the work of Drs. Clara Richard and Funmilola Oluwafemi provides direction. Their will to engage with the action comes as a signal of much-needed alignment: between cutting-edge knowledge, integrity in purpose, and the planetary scale of our challenges.

It did sadden to see disrespect to your hard work and career achievements during the leadership selection process, by those ignorant who have not even contributed, nor achieved, neither aim, to do anything ever resembling your major undertakings.

Dr. Clara Richard, co-founder and CEO of NeurAstra, embodies the fusion of lived human exploration with cognitive and environmental systems design. Whether navigating a scientific road trip through the Alps or engineering experiments to study radiation’s impact on neural tissue, her work exemplifies applied foresight. Her practice reflects what One Health in the twenty-first century must entail: an unwavering commitment to human adaptability, cognitive clarity, and ecological embeddedness, all wrapped in an ethos of shared learning and critical questioning.

From remote consultancy to immersive fieldwork, from celestial observations to ergonomic design in harsh environments, Dr. Richard’s pathway is not a detour, it is the main road. By integrating neuroscience, human factors, and space systems design, she has advanced a vision of human presence that respects limits, honours diversity, and prepares rigorously for what lies ahead. Her open-ended, educational ethos, summarised in the Celestography project and the Cosmic Connections events, reflects not only her technical range but her values: inclusion, curiosity, and responsibility across domains.

Dr. Funmilola Oluwafemi, Chief Scientific Officer at the Nigerian Space Agency and a globally recognised astrobiologist, brings with her decades of scientific and institutional credibility. Her leadership in the Space Life Sciences Division, especially her work in microgravity and ecosystem preservation, directly anchors One Health in outer space and planetary biosystems alike. Her roles with UNOOSA and NASA’s Open Science Data Repository mark a clear commitment to transparency, planetary justice, and the education of future generations. Dr. Funmilola Oluwafemi is also founder and president of Funafo Innovations Promotion Foundation for Women and Youths, a hybrid NGO based in Abuja dedicated to advancing equitable access to education, research, and vocational training in space life sciences, climate-smart agriculture, and emerging technologies. The foundation actively develops curricula, mentorship programs, and capacity-building initiatives to foster scientific excellence and sustainable development among underrepresented communities.

Dr. Oluwafemi’s efforts are not only about the survival of astronauts or the mitigation of health risks. Her policy-driven scholarship, her work on curriculum development, and her foundation supporting women and youth in science are expressions of justice through science. They signal a realignment of priorities toward sustainability, equity, and global knowledge transfer. Over seventy peer-reviewed contributions, major international recognitions such as the Zonta Amelia Earhart Fellowship, and her grassroots mentoring efforts confirm her impact.

Nothing can be left to improvisation, when lives are at stake. Not one launch, nothing, no interplanetary settlement will ever succeed -including here, down to Earth- if we tolerate the ethical complacency and structural injustice that define most governance today. The stakes are not abstract. Back here, on this scarred Earth, the Amazon, once described by early European travellers as the site of sprawling civilisations, is being erased from both memory and life itself. The evidence now confirms what they saw: dense networks of human-made landscapes, forest cities, agricultural systems adapted to floodplain cycles. And yet today, with full knowledge of its unsustainable logic, we continue to burn it. We kill its people. For what? For infertile land. For commodities devoid of long-term value. For short-term extraction masquerading as development. From the Sahel to the Atlantic, we ignored records of African voyagers who reached the Americas before Europe institutionalised enslavement. Their legacy, like much of deep planetary wisdom, remains marginalised. Yet, truth, scientific, archaeological, experiential, surfaces eventually. It demands from us a different level of accountability.

Human life is fragile. Entire populations have been extinguished not by weapon or famine alone, but by microbial contact, pathogens carried unintentionally across oceans. In the first centuries of contact, up to 90% of Indigenous peoples in the Americas perished from Old World infections to which they had no immunity: smallpox, measles, influenza. This biological violence preceded and accompanied the military campaigns. But fragility was not unilateral. European settlers themselves succumbed in vast numbers to malaria, yellow fever, and unfamiliar tropical diseases. This mutual biological vulnerability became, in perverse fashion, a structural argument for the transatlantic slave trade, enslaving Africans deemed more resilient to certain diseases, to build colonies that would not otherwise survive. The massacres, the slavery, the justification of one crime through another, were never legitimate. They reveal the capacity of human systems to amplify harm under pressure, to rationalise atrocity, to evade accountability. This legacy demands confrontation, not commemoration. It calls for education, ethics, and a global commitment to prevention, not post hoc regret.

And yet, it is not knowledge that we lack. It is discipline. Resolve. Systems to implement what is already known. Nothing of value, least of all survival, is achieved without the rigor to pursue it stage by stage, across generations. No mission to the Moon, nor lasting peace on Earth, ever came from improvisation or inertia. What we face now, a destabilised climate, emerging pandemics, degraded biosphere being diminished by the day, planetary inequality, is not beyond our capacity, but beyond our current moral will. We must be strict, usparing in principle. Every child stunted today by preventable malnutrition is an engineering failure of global coordination. Every unvaccinated community, an echo of a brutal hierarchy. Every fire in the Amazon, an act of planetary vandalism we still allow. This is not the time for hesitation or soft ambition. It is the time to redesign what we mean by civilisation.

We cannot build for Venus, Mars, Europa, while we fail to protect Earth. We cannot speak of innovation if our children starve, stunted, enslaved, or abandoned. As of the latest available data, over 333 million children live in extreme poverty. Nearly 45 million suffer from wasting and 149 million from stunting. 160 million children are engaged in child labour. An estimated 244 million remain out of school. This is not an accident. It is a structural failure of planetary stewardship.

What Drs. Richard and Oluwafemi work for is the antithesis to this collapse: method, rigour, science, and global responsibility. Their experience and expertise speaks of doing things properly, never acting sloppily, never leaving decisions to improvisation. Medicine, science and engineering with foresight, educating with empathy, and ensuring the most vulnerable are never excluded from humanity’s forward motion.

It is this kind of leadership that One Health must now reflect. A leadership that spans planets, molecules, ecosystems, classrooms and governance bodies across this one planet of ours. One Health action that is humble in origin and ambitious in scope.

We are grateful, deeply, to both for considering stepping in to guide this action. And we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with minds that not only lead but listen, that not only reach but return to lift others. Our network must keep on advancing not only as a COST action, but as a strong platform for the best, a planetary undertaking, one that recognises, with uncompromising clarity, that resilience is never accidental and survival is never improvised. Just as no space mission is launched without exhaustive planning, layered redundancy, and the highest engineering precision, neither can our shared future be built on wishful thinking or piecemeal action. This action demands deliberate, staged implementation: every step laid down with care, every phase reinforced with scientific rigour, every system running in parallel, tested, and secure. We need nothing less than full-spectrum planning, global mobilisation of intellect and skill, and a refusal to accept mediocrity. All must be trained, ready, and focused, not because the path is easy, but because nothing short of excellence will sustain life, dignity, or hope on Earth or beyond. One Health, yes, but let us start counting moons, stations, biospheres yet to be inhabited or healed. Not out of hubris, but as a reminder: we must get this right, there may be far more health to safeguard than we once imagined.

Amid widespread institutional failures and planetary threats, the acceptance of our session One Health Education for a Sustainable World: Integrating Systems Thinking, Technology, and Youth Empowerment into the official program is cause for profound reflection and shared purpose. This initiative is neither ornamental nor symbolic – it is a working declaration of principles, capabilities, and responsibilities. We aim to demonstrate, through interdisciplinary science and practical pedagogy, that education remains a decisive force for transformation.

Lab and fieldwork open science notes on acuity & resilience

Announcing Our One Health Education for a Sustainable World Session at UN Science

Summary: our session at the Science Summit 2025, alongside the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80), was selected yesterday…

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10 months ago · Henning Garcia Torrents

Session themes and objectives: this session brings forward actionable models for integrating One Health education across levels, contexts, and geographies.

Our session focuses on:

• Embedding systems thinking in curricula to reveal the interdependence of human, animal, and environmental health

• Ethically grounding the use of emerging technologies, including AI, within education and public health

• Enabling youth as co-creators of sustainable futures, not as passive recipients of knowledge

Through participatory, cross-sectoral, and open-source approaches, the session aligns with and advances SDGs 3, 4, 13, 16, and 17. It responds to the global need for epistemic justice, health equity, and civic capacity-building.

Our session speakers:

• Professor Sara Soto González – ISGlobal, Spain
  Renowned expert in infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and epidemiological transitions. Her work bridges field epidemiology and policy design, with special focus on vulnerable settings and equity in global health research.

• Professor Susan Michaels-Strasser – Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA
  Senior Director at ICAP and long-time leader in nursing education, maternal-child health, and global health workforce development. She has shaped institutional responses to HIV and primary care across multiple continents.

• Professor Dr. Mahmoud El Fiky – Cairo University, Egypt
  Surgeon and educator, leader of Egypt’s Health NCP for Horizon Europe. With over 130 peer-reviewed publications, he promotes global health collaboration, pediatric care reform, and the modernization of medical curricula.

• Professor Janaina Minelli de Oliveira Ramos – Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
  Educational theorist focused on epistemological justice, environmental education, and sustainable pedagogies. A catalyst for inclusive curriculum reform and institutional transformation.

• Dr. Safieh Shah – IGDORE, Pakistan
  Medical doctor, open science advocate, and pioneer in ethical research under constraints. Her work integrates clinical medicine, planetary health, and gender equity, and is respected for its methodological clarity and commitment to underserved communities.

Alignment with EU COST action BEACON One Health education: this session has been designed in full alignment with the goals of the EU COST action BEACON One Health Education. The network – conceived under duress and built with determination – has recently received formal funding and support. Despite ongoing structural and personal challenges, our commitment remains unwavering. Professor María Jesús Lirola, current chair of this action, will represent us at the upcoming COST leadership workshop in Brussels. Further updates will follow.

We are working, to the limit of our capacities and within the highest ethical standards, to protect this initiative from opportunism, misuse, and manipulation. Every decision, proposal, and output will be made publicly available, subject to peer review, and grounded in open-source technologies. EU BEACON is not to serve private ambitions, but public responsibility, the educational and health needs of all the youth and children, specially that of those most harmed by systemic neglect.

Next steps and participation: we are preparing Horizon Europe calls within this framework. Expressions of interest are welcome and encouraged. For now, please contact henning.garcia@urv.cat – institutional addresses will follow once disbursement processes are complete. Our operating principle is scientific truth in the open, with transparent governance and dedication to the shared good. We aim to build durable, equitable platforms of cooperation that outlast individual tenure and resist structural injustice.

A word of integrity and acknowledgement: the current moment requires clarity, both globally and us as an awarded network. It has been harsh, as most blows have been dealt in the dark of silence, hidden from our collective oversight. The action has suffered attempts at derailment, exclusion, and abuse of trust, some actually harming it and those among us truly working to make it work, in very troubling and serious ways, lies and normalized abuses allowing. Scientific networks must never be co-opted by power-seeking actors, nor be arenas of silent harm. We remain committed to the original goals of this action: protecting dignity, advancing science, and delivering justice through education and structural repair, truly supporting each other, to achieve the goals the best possible way.

This session will be conducted by exemplary professionals, individuals of proven character, expertise, and social conscience. They strive to not posture, but serve. This is the spirit that does define EU BEACON, and must be safeguarded, enforced: ethical science, inclusive education, and planetary responsibility. The session will be free to attend online. Updates, access links, and outcomes will be shared shortly. We move forward, not in denial of harm, but in collective resolve to end it. For the children, for the planet, and for the truth science is meant to uphold.

We are pleased to officially confirm that Dr María Jesús Lirola has been appointed as the action-wide leader of our EU BEACON, recently awarded under the EU COST Science and Technology Coordination Programme. The action will operate from late 2025 to late 2029. Its official institutional hub is accessible at https://health.int.eu.org, where all verified communications and formal outputs will be published.

Please, note the other two official platforms:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@onehealthedtech
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/107609460/

All official communication is now fully centralised through our validated platforms. We kindly ask all members to share this announcement widely. Your support is essential to raise awareness, attract qualified contributors and ensure the success of this crucial initiative. We invite all members, collaborators and interested colleagues to follow and subscribe to our official communication channels. All previous informal groups on third-party messaging platforms are no longer officially endorsed. These spaces remain open only for informal exchanges. No formal announcements will be issued there, except through authenticated bots once deployed. As part of our broader mission, open democratic decision-support systems will be developed to promote inclusive and participatory processes across all levels of the school, including in our action affiliated schools. These tools will support conflict prevention, deliberation and ethical decision-making as core components of One Health education. Action funds will be allocated using an open peer reviewed transparent system as well.

EU BEACON consolidates a legally recognised, publicly funded, and transdisciplinary infrastructure dedicated to advancing One Health education as the primary lever for sustainable development, societal well-being, and planetary resilience. The appointment of Dr Lirola marks a structurally decisive stage in the action’s trajectory, from its initial foundation and planning stages to the launch of a fully coordinated, implementation-ready platform, guided by one of its most capable and ethically committed contributors. In light of the scope and urgency of our goals, the integrity of leadership and communication is paramount. All stakeholders are therefore reminded that the action’s governance structure is defined, formalised, and anchored in institutional legitimacy.

Dr Lirola’s academic and pedagogical trajectory aligns rigorously with the strategic direction of the action. She brings deep expertise in embedding health education across disciplinary curricula, in promoting biocultural diversity and equity, and in ensuring that cooperation, not competition, guides scientific and institutional advancement. Her contributions demonstrate the necessity of transitioning from unidirectional knowledge transfer to co-production, in which learners, professionals, and communities interact on equal epistemological and ethical terms. This principle will structure the implementation of EU BEACON across languages, regions, institutions, and learning contexts.

Her longstanding leadership in dialogical approaches and inclusive sport situates her work exactly at the intersection where our EU BEACON action is anchored: education, mental health, and participatory transformation. Dialogical methods, originally developed in clinical psychiatry, have since evolved into powerful frameworks for conflict resolution, institutional transparency, and peacebuilding. Their foundations in non-hierarchical listening, shared meaning-making, and mutual accountability make them indispensable for constructing trust-based, deliberative environments in education and public health. Within the One Health paradigm, where intersectoral cooperation, transdisciplinary knowledge, and intercultural sensitivity are essential, dialogical competence is not optional. It is both a method and a goal: to develop the collective capacity to resolve and prevent conflict without coercion, exclusion, or epistemic domination.

Dr Lirola’s recognised expertise in sport and exercise sciences strengthens the action’s capacity to address the embodied, ecological, and developmental dimensions of health. Inclusive sport, as implemented in her work through the Inclúyete programme and other laboratories, operates not only as a practice to support physical and mental well-being, but as a universal language of cooperation, regulation, and resilience. These structured, egalitarian contexts allow children and adults alike to reclaim agency, recover social belonging, and restore biological and psychological integrity. These pedagogical modalities, dialogue and movement, are not peripheral to One Health. They are its core mechanisms for fostering peaceful, bioculturally grounded, and cognitively rich communities.

Under Dr Lirola’s official leadership, these practices will be systematically embedded into the action’s open curricula, participatory pedagogies, and policy-relevant models. The objective is clear: to ensure that One Health education is not an abstract proposition but a lived, shareable, and practical reality, scientifically grounded, culturally inclusive, and ethically guided.

As we advance under consolidated EU COST funding through 2029, aiming to secure every recognition and partnership that excellence and urgency allow, our action is committed to becoming a fully recognised EU Flagship. This is not symbolic but a structural, scientific and ethical necessity. The scale and interconnection of current global crises including ecological collapse, zoonotic spread, forced displacement, educational breakdown and mental health emergencies demand a coordinated and transdisciplinary response. One Health education, driven by ethical technological innovation, is the decisive lever to restore system coherence, protect biocultural life and build the conditions for peace and sustainability. The groundwork laid by 2029 must support full-scale implementation across EU Member States and international partners, with permanent infrastructures, open curricula and sustained cooperation. Our action exists to ensure the best possible present for every child by building the educational basis of a good, shared future.

One Health is not a future goal or technical niche. It is the only viable framework to address planetary survival, intergenerational justice and the transformation of education. It integrates human, animal, environmental and technological dimensions and requires high-quality, sustained learning to become operative. Without this, One Health remains fragmented and unfulfilled. Our action is designed to resolve that gap and embed One Health in practice, policy and understanding.

In direct alignment with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, our action focuses on SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). It also supports SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 5 (Gender Equality), recognising that malnutrition, exclusion, violence and ecological degradation are structurally linked. Without an educational realignment grounded in One Health, these goals will remain unattainable. Our action places educational transformation at the centre of a coherent and sustainable approach to global development.

Under Dr Lirola’s leadership, our action will serve as a pan-European and global platform for children, educators, professionals, and researchers to learn together. Through open curricular models, multilingual resources and collaborative teaching practices, we will support new content and open courseware from early childhood to postgraduate education. One Health principles must be integrated into all disciplines, not as an added theme but as a scientific and ethical foundation. As with gender equality and environmental responsibility, One Health must be embedded across systems.

Our action also fosters a deeper cultural shift. Education becomes a tool for peace, shared prosperity and restored dignity. Health is not simply the absence of illness but the full expression of human potential in diverse and cooperative communities.

To ensure continuity, memoranda of understanding with institutional partners are now being prepared. Sponsorship campaigns are being designed to engage multinational companies, public agencies, foundations and international bodies. These efforts will support both the action and its projects, curricula, platforms and innovations. Diversified funding will enable sustained delivery of outcomes and ensure responsible development and use of all outputs during and beyond the current funding cycle.

We now invite all members to prepare proposals for working groups, research lines, experimental curricula and digital tools. All must align with scientific integrity and One Health priorities. National, regional and disciplinary networks should be organised, with lists of individuals and institutions to invite during the recruitment phase beginning this summer.

Members are also encouraged to nominate experts for interviews to support dissemination and synthesis. Dialogues and moderated debates will expand the shared knowledge base. Focus groups, coordination meetings and brainstorming sessions will help define upcoming grant proposals and consortia. These steps will secure long-term scientific and educational impact beyond the official period of the action.

We thank all contributors to date. Under the leadership of Dr María Jesús Lirola, and with the continued support of our global coordination, we now move forward to implement the action with precision and vision. The work is demanding, but so is our shared capacity. Guided by rigorous knowledge, mutual care and deep ethical commitment, we move ahead together to educate not only for survival but for meaningful and just life.

Further updates and planning schedules will follow shortly.