Our COST Action Chair and Vice-Chair Carina Dantas and Willeke Van Staalduinen were in Brussels on 20 and 21 April, at the COST Association, for the COST Connect event on Ageing in Europe: Challenges and Opportunities with COST, EIT Health and European Commission officers, as well as experts from relevant areas and other COST Action representatives.
It is expected that the number of people older than 80 years is to increase six times by 2100. We now live twice as long as our great-grandparents, and our population is up eightfold — from 1 billion to 8 billion. These major demographic changes will raise both challenges and opportunities. This COST Connect event offered a platform for multi-stakeholder discussions and interactions on this topic. COST supports more than 20 COST Actions in the broader field of healthy and active ageing, and is therefore a driving force in these debates. Finding solutions for the challenges linked to ageing and its societal implications will require a multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach, relying on both discoveries in research and innovative methods across disciplines. Collaboration will be key by sharing knowledge, expertise and multi-disciplinary insights. This event gathered representatives of these COST Actions, as well as different important stakeholders and policy-makers in the field, such as the European Commission, the EIT, UN related bodies and different relevant stakeholders.
Participating in this event allowed our COST Action representatives to gain relevant insights on the recent developments in the fields of ageing, and related funding possibilities on European level; to interact with a selected group of researchers in other topic-relevant COST Actions and get insights into their activities and impact; and to network with key policy-makers, experts and stakeholders actively working on this topic.
The NET4 Chair and Vice-Chair presented NET4, as well as its roots with the SHAFE movement and the EU project also synergising with our Action, SIRENE.
SHAFE and NET4 were also part of the presentation of Irina Kalderon-Libal from the European Commission (DG CNECT) on policy priorities and initiatives!