To mark World Environment Day 2026, the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC) — one of HARMONIE’s partner institutions — launched an illustrated artistic campaign inspired by the major scientific challenges that guide the institute’s research. One of those challenges is tackling the health impacts of air and noise pollution in cities — and HARMONIE is at the heart of it.
For the campaign, IDAEA collaborated with marine scientist and illustrator Claudia Sanz, who visually interpreted each scientific challenge, transforming complex concepts into images capable of inspiring new questions and perspectives. The illustration above — Detect and understand pollution and its effects — is her visual response to the questions HARMONIE is working to answer.
The campaign also shines a light on what the project is doing. IDAEA describes how HARMONIE links urban pollution with health indicators, models the impacts of different urban planning scenarios, and helps cities design fairer and more effective strategies to tackle these issues — combining sensor networks, mobile bicycle monitoring campaigns, household monitoring and digital models, and analysing both traditional pollutants and emerging indicators such as black carbon, ultrafine particles and oxidative potential.
At the heart of the project’s approach are digital twins of five European cities — Barcelona, Barakaldo, Lausanne, Gävle and Sarajevo — built on real-world pollution measurements, behavioural patterns and health data, enabling simulations of how urban interventions affect pollution patterns and people’s health.
For Ioar Rivas, IDAEA researcher and HARMONIE team member, the human dimension is what makes this work especially meaningful: “One of the most exciting aspects is that we will study how exposure to pollution affects vulnerable groups, such as patients with respiratory diseases and children with asthma.”
Discover the full campaign on the IDAEA-CSIC website here.
