Conducting remote materials education and outreach with in-person communities: implementation and reflections

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted educators all over the world and a major area of disruption has been the ability for higher education institutions to provide meaningful STEM education activities to the broader community. In this work, methods to adapt materials science outreach activities to meet the needs of students, teachers, and the community at large during the pandemic are explored and outcomes and recommendations are provided. This is accomplished through a focus on three efforts: fully-virtual classroom visits, remote visitation for in-person classrooms, and an innovative hybrid museum tour that showcases materials science in art for general community outreach. Results show that methods developed with restrictions on in-person interaction in place can have benefits in terms of the ability to reach broader audiences while also fostering more consistent interaction between those broader audiences and those conducting outreach. These methods also have the potential to remain effective even following a return to "normal" conditions and thus supplement and positively augment pre-pandemic methods. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

New Zealand's Climate Change Commission report: the critical need to address the missing health co-benefits of reducing emissions

The Climate Change Commission's draft report and recommendations provide a pathway towards achieving the New Zealand Government's commitment to net zero emissions by 2050. However, the Commission has not adequately considered the health co-benefits of climate change mitigation. In this viewpoint, we assess how the Commission has considered health co-benefits in the key response domains. Extrapolating UK evidence to the New Zealand context suggests climate change mitigation strategies that reduce air pollution, transition the population towards plant-based diets and increase physical activity via active transport could prevent thousands of deaths per year in coming decades. Substantial health co-benefits would also arise from improved housing, cleaner water, noise reductions, afforestation and more compact cities. The Commission's draft report only briefly mentions many of these health co-benefits, and some are completely absent. We recommend the Commission's final report: (i) use health co-benefits as an explicit frame;(ii) ensure the government's Treaty of Waitangi obligations are met in all the domains covered to maximise benefits for Maori health and wellbeing;(iii) build on the successful COVID-19 response that demonstrated rapid, science-informed and vigorous government action can address major global health threats;(iv) include both public health expertise and Maori health expertise among its commissioners;(v) explain how health co-benefits are likely to generate major cost-savings to the health system.