The Deputy Director of WASCAL DRP-WACS, Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) Prof. Ifeoluwa Balogun and one of his students , Miss Oluwabukola Kemisola Babalola, who is also a Youth Mappers Regional Ambassador for Africa , recently participated in the Concept Design Workshop for Global Health Resilience Service (GHRS) organized by The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) at their headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland from 28th – 29th February 2024. GEO and WMO is developing the Global Heat Resilience Service (GHRS) aimed at providing every urban area in the world with crucial intelligence on the health risks posed by extreme heat. It therefore brings together people across organizations and sectors to rapidly imagine new ways of planning and acting on extreme heat. Together, they will co-create concepts for improving heat resiliency in cities through a 48-hour idea generation and prototyping workshop. The workshop is designed to give a glimpse into the future; learning how potential users of the Global Heat Resilience Service will react to early concepts to ensure the development of an offering that meets real-world needs. The insights will assist cities and communities in developing plans to adapt to heat and reduce the impact on public health and local economies. The workshop birth a set of prioritised use cases and a few conceptual prototypes that can be further built out and iterate on with a set of pilot cities and communities throughout 2024. Prof. Ifeoluwa Balogun’s invitation was consequent on the global spread of positive outcomes of the Youth Mappers Open Street Mapping Workshop on Heat and Health that he facilitated and hosted at FUTA in October 2023. Prof. Balogun was privileged to attend the workshop with one of his students from the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science.
Their participation was fully funded by the Organizations.
