The International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS) is trying to raise the awareness that microbiology can contribute solutions to climate change, which is a major threat to humanity and life on Earth.
IUMS believes that the trillion species of microbes that live in our planet encode for genes that can provide sustainable and actionable solutions to mitigate most of the planetary challenges linked to climate change, including health, greenhouse gases and biodiversity. In preparation of the next international IUMS congress that will be held in Florence on October 22-24 2024 (https://iums2024.com/), we prepared several initiatives. One of them is to encourage microbiologists from all over the world to make proposals for microbe-driven sustainable and actionable solutions for the health of the planet. To do so, we made an agreement with the journal Frontiers in Microbiology to publish a special Research Topic under the name of “Save the Microbes to Save the Planet” that will contain papers describing innovative, microbe-driven sustainable and actionable solutions that can help health of humans, animals, and the planet itself. The idea is to stimulate microbiologist to realize that we have the opportunity and the responsibility to propose solutions.
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/57992/expert-opinions-save-the-microbes-to-save-the-planet
Authors are asked to submit their papers by March 31st . The authors of the best ideas proposed will also be invited to be co-authors of review paper to be published in Frontiers in Science summarizing solutions that will, be used for advocacy, and will be proposed to stakeholders, policy makers and funding bodies. The overall recommendations will be that discussed in dedicated workshop at the IUMS meeting in Florence.
