Earth Day Med 2024 took place from April 19 to 22, in various locations across the city of Palermo. The festival hosted concerts, screenings, children’s workshops, artistic performances, and a scientific and political conference on the ecological and environmental challenges of our time. There was no better place than Palermo and Sicily to reflect on the complexity of the situation in the Mediterranean: thanks to its central position in the basin, Sicily has preserved the memory of ancient cultures that passed through the region over the centuries and has become a landing point for those fleeing conflict and poverty, often worsened by climate change.
The program started with a workshop for high school students on the importance of sustainable agriculture for our health and that of the Planet where the key questions of the agricultural sector in the Mediterranean will be addressed.
In the next days we organized a Nutrition Laboratory on Microbiota with Giuseppe Iacono, Founding Member of the Steering Committee of the Italian Society of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
The Forest Bating Immersive experience took place in the Natural reserve of Monte Pellegrino, in collaboration with the National Forest Bathing Settore CSEN and the Maranima Experience Nature association.
The Eaerth Day Med Festival 2024 closed with the International Conference “The Mediterranean as a climate change hotspot: not only risks but also opportunities for cooperation and common growth”. The contents of the conference focused on the Mediterranean, defined as one of the most important and vulnerable hotspots to climate change and analyzed both from a scientific point of view and with regard to adaptation measures.
International Artist Jonas Staal created a campaign called “Redistribute Extinction” for this year festival. A series of painted posters, displayed on billboards and buses in the city of Palermo, with the aim of raising awareness of how climate catastrophe and its enormous impact on armed conflict and resource scarcity disproportionately impact precisely the Global South, indigenous peoples and people of color, women, minorities and the poor. The images, in particular, point to accountability about the scourge of fires and floods in Sicily.
The festival is promoted by: Fondazione Studio Rizoma in collaboration with ECCO – the Italian climate think tank, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the University of Palermo and EStà – center for Sustainability and University Transition