The Crete Declaration (https://www.lifewatch.eu/crete-declaration) is a Declaration of Intent signed on 30 June 2025, on the occasion of the BEeS 2025 Conference, during the âWorking Table on Life component of the Biosphere: Complementarities and Synergiesâ. The event gathered European Research Infrastructures (RIs), projects and organisations with the common goal of exploring shared solutions to todayâs global challenges.
Coordinated by LifeWatch ERIC, the signing of the Crete Declaration followed the Working Table’s objective of defining a collaborative roadmap among the parties. Their shared ambition is to advance the One Health approach, a strategy to optimise the health of people, animals, and ecosystems, through collaboration, research product integration, and open science.
This is of vital importance since the challenges of our time (climate change, biodiversity degradation, emerging diseases and many others) are complex and deeply intertwined, and therefore demand a joint effort of complementary strengths.
The policy brief containing the Crete Declaration is now published on the RIO (Research Ideas and Outcomes) journal, as the latest contribution to the LifeWatch ERIC Strategic Working Plan Outcomes open-science collection (https://riojournal.com/topical_collection/243/), a one-stop access point to the most important deliverables by the research infrastructure consortium.
The Declaration focused the signatoriesâ commitment around four key strategic points:
- Strengthening the strategic collaboration
- Advancing data integration and FAIR principles
- Supporting Open Science Ecosystems
- Informing Policy and Practice
The parties welcome all European stakeholders committed to One Health to endorse this Declaration and contribute to its implementation.
Read more on EurekAlert, Pensoft and AlphaGalileo.