Sotiris Vardoulakis  0:09  
Thank you to all the panellists. It was great to, to have Puple House and community-controlled organisations. It was great to have the communities of practice from Western Australia. And the other speakers Phil Weinstein and Billie Giles-Corti. Fantastic session. Thank you so much. Without without further ado, I will move to the next session, which is an important one: the presentation of the best poster award for the conference. As you know, there was a call for posters and abstracts for this conference, and we had some great submissions. They are all available online on the conference website under the Materials tab. And in my colleagues, Professor Bin Jalaludin, Professor Jane Hayworth and Dr Brenda Lin had difficult time to select the best poster. So I would like to invite Jal and Brenda to present the best award and give us their outcome.

Bin Jalaludin  1:17  
Thank you very much. I think Brenda is not in the audience. So I will present the best poster award. I think there were just over 20 posters and certainly it took us a fair bit of time, going to and fro over a couple of days, trying to work out who, which was the best poster and we had a few few guidelines on how we would rank the posters. And we give a quantitative score to each of the posters and then we add them up. All in all, the best poster is the one by Emma Austin, Anthony Kiem, Jane Rich, David Perkins and Brian Kelly. And the title of the poster was: "How effectively do drought indices capture health outcomes in rural Australia?" And interesting, interesting study looking at various indices of drought and the windows of drought that most effectively capture wellbeing outcomes. And I think their results highlighted the complexity of the relationship between drought in wellbeing and the importance of choosing the right, the appropriate windows of exposure, and the length of drought. So well done, Emma and the team, and congratulations.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  2:56  
Thank you so much to the committee. Congratulations to Emma Austin, the team at Newcastle University for excellent work. Now without further ado we'll move to the to the last session of the conference, the closing remarks. And now I would like to invite again two colleagues. I would like to invite Professor Bin Jalaludin from the University of New South Wales, Adjunct Professor. But Jal, importantly, has a very long experience in the public health sector and in New South Wales, and he is a very experienced colleague, a very experienced environmental epidemiologist with a lot of international experience as well as experience in New South Wales and Australia. So I would like to ask Jal to give his perspective. And also I would like to important to ask our younger colleague and emerging leader, Dr. Elly Howse from the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, to give her perspective, her reflections about the conference in the step forward for the HEAL network. So thank you both for joining this final panel with concluding remarks from the conference. And maybe we'll start with Jal and then move to Ellie. Thank you so much.

Bin Jalaludin  4:20  
Okay, thank you very much. Look, I think it has been, we've had a feast over the last two days. We've had some wonderful, thought provoking presentation by renowned national, international scientists and speakers. And for me personally, it was great to see some very, very familiar faces, and well also many who I saw who did not know personally, but certainly, the names were instantly recognised by the involvement in the many different facets of climate change research. You know, I had also kind of listened very intently to many of the speakers and presentations in the breakout groups. And the breakout sessions range, from Indigenous knowledges, to biosecurity, food and water security, to science communications. And I must say the science can't be faulted. We have done, we do, and we've done some very good science. And we are adding to the evidence that climate change and global warming is real and urgent. But I guess what has struck me especially in the first day, in the first plenary session was, despite all the research we've done, we still have a long way to go. We all thought that COP 26 did not meet the expectations of most and indeed, probably all of us. A clear message throughout the day was that we need other ways to make things happen. The science is established, as was pointed out by Professor Mark Howden. We are now into the sixth IPCC assessment reports. Alistair Woodward did not think that bigger and better studies where the answer. So there's a science to action gap and this was alluded to by Alistair. And it was also suggested that we need to speed up the cycle of knowledge to advocacy. So this is where the main action needs to be. This is where the main game should be: how we get a knowledge into action. But the question is how and Carmel Lawrence made a very telling point: that politicians respond to pressure. And, interestingly, Alan Finkel a former chief scientist, in his latest quarterly essay, also says the same thing. He makes the point that advocacy is not sufficient to drive change, we need to convert information and advocacy into pressure. And then I would suggest, just going off the topic a bit, I would suggest that this is what will be the key challenge for HEAL over the next few years, or the next five years. I mean, we have the people, we are the best people to do the best science. The challenge will be in how we go beyond simply translation. And beyond advocacy as we know it. To create a pressure that will lead to change in action. HEAL needs to connect with people from outside our orbit. For example, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and his wife have pledged to donate and invest $1.5 billion on climate change projects by 2030 to reinforce the COP 26 goal of spurring global change, to limit global warming. The Climate Leaders coalition is a group of 31 seals from leading private and public companies and NGOs. And the 31 leading organisations contribute 22% of Australia's greenhouse gases, the Climate Leaders coalition has a roadmap to reduce, to decarbonize by 2030. So I don't see HEAL crowd-connect with these kinds of influences, people who can influence organisations that have great influence. So HEAL and all of us here, need to look at other ways where we can build pressure, and we can change and where we can transform our knowledge into action. And I think this is going to be a great challenge for HEAL, but also be a very exciting challenge for HEAL. Thank you.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  9:32  
Thank you so much Jal. Very well said, big challenge ahead and we need to rise to the challenge and make the best out of the investment colleagues, NHMRC, and universities have done from around the country. Can invite please Ellie? What is your take on HEAL and what is your take on the conference and the challenge ahead?

Elly Howse  9:54  
Thanks so much Sotiris for the opportunity to share my thoughts and thanks Jal for, you know, all of the amazing things that you just said. And I'm probably going to agree with lots of what you said. I guess there was sort of three main takeaways that I gained from the last couple of days of the HEAL conference. And I think the first one is the incredibly deep expertise in Australia that we have around environmental change and human health. Like I've been quite overawed by the decades of research and policy and practice experience that has been represented over the last two days. I think Jeff Standen in a session before described it as a brains trust. And so it was just great to see that really rich picture painted by all of our research and policy partners. And just that there is so much good work happening across Australia, which is fabulous to see. And I was also struck by the respect, we all have for each other's expertise across different areas, particularly those of us who are coming from different disciplines and sectors. And it also highlighted the knowledge of Indigenous and First Nations people as being integral to all of this, which I thought was really important and crucial. The second takeaway from this is just the importance of partnerships and collaborations and relationships. I mentioned and Jal talked about all of that expertise about the science and, and policy and practice, but how do we actually bring all that expertise together. And this is actually the purpose of the HEAL network and of the funding, building the relational infrastructure that's needed to support impact and drive systems change. And that's what we have discovered at the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, that it's so important to nurture relationships with one another across disciplines and sectors. It's not just about investing in research. And again, I know there's a really strong thread of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations leadership at the heart of this relational infrastructure. And that's really fantastic to see as well. The third takeaway I had was actually more on a on a kind of emotional level. So I think many of us feel quite hopeless, sometimes and anxious and really worried about the pace and the speed of climate and environmental change and the resulting health impacts particularly because we know they are so inequitably distributed. And I think the HEAL network, and particularly getting together over the last few days is really about channelling those emotions into purposeful action. So prior to working in public health and research, I actually worked across the union movement, and in community organising and in politics. And we have a saying that we use there that's called Educate, agitate, organise. And the HEAL conference, I think has been about educating and agitating on these issues that we care about so deeply, but our next task is to organise. And the five years of funding for the HEAL network is about helping us to do that. So by working together, building and nurturing strong partnerships and relationships across research, government, NGOs, and the community, we can actually live our values as in terms of being passionate advocates for the environment and for health. We can respond to these complex challenges. And we can generate and apply those transformative solutions that are informed by the science evidence and knowledge that we know has to happen. So I've actually left feeling really quite hopeful and excited about what the next five years and beyond will bring for the network and for this area of work in Australia. Thanks. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  13:29  
Thank you. Thank you so much Elly. So well said and I couldn't agree more that we need to trust relationships, we need to organise ourselves, you know, where there is a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of work to be done, and then have resources and people will still most importantly people to the expertise and enthusiasm to do that. I would like to move on. And very important acknowledgement session now. Before closing the conference, I would like to say that I'm absolutely delighted with the level of enthusiasm, participation, the quality of the talks we had over two days and the discussion. I'm very grateful to all the speakers and participants, and Chairs of the of the of the conference. I would like to say first of all, I couldn't thanks enough Auntie Linda Ford and Auntie Mara West, Dr Veronica Matthews, and all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders of our network. This wouldn't have happened without them, and they're absolutely the cornerstone of the HEAL Consortium. One of the key points that I take is that we need the reciprocal relationships with their communities, the Communities of Practice, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities which are involved the network and all the colleagues and partners, either members of the HEAL network named investigators and those who are not named on our grant. So we want to be open, equitable, and inclusive, and we'll make that happen in the coming months and years. I would also like to thank very much, the governor of Queensland. We're so honoured to have Dr Jeannette Young introducing the second day of the conference. And also we're very honoured to have the Vice Chancellor of ANU, the dean of my College of Health and Medicine and also Anne Kelso, the CEO of NHMRC introducing day one of the conference. I'm very grateful and I'd like to thank the Organising Committee. As I said, all the chairs and speakers have done an amazing job, all the organising of the breakout sessions and also importantly, I would like to thank my own team. I would like to thank Daniela Espinoza Oyarce. Daniela you have been amazing organising and supporting the conference and all of us. I would like to thank Nina Lazarevic from my team. I would like to thank Amelia Joshi and all the colleagues from ANU and the media team and their communications team have been amazing supporting this conference. Also, I would like to thank Commune Digital, who have organised the technical aspects of the online conference. They have been extremely supportive and responsive to us and special thanks to Kristina, Sam and Darren for their support. Thanks, all of you. Importantly, all the participants. Thank for putting your ideas in the chat box. Please look out for the evaluation form for the conference in the chat box and we'll also email that to you to your email addresses. It's important for us to take home the messages that you've sent us, the feedback. This is the start of a beautiful journey. We'll have our annual conference and many more events as part of the HEAL partnership. And it's important to learn from this experience today. It has been an experimental conference, has been online, hybrid, with breakout meetings in five states and we are learning as we're doing this work. And then of course it has been important for us to ensure that it is a nearly zero carbon conference. And we are working, we're working the line. We are consistent with our principles and what we have set out to achieve with this consortium. Thank you so much. Again, please stay safe and keep in touch with the the HEAL network and the work we'll be doing in the in the coming years collectively. Thank you all. Have a safe and good rest of the day.