Leonardo Adorno (English) - Voices from the field Community Health Workshop 2026

Summary: Leonardo will discuss his experience as a public health graduate in Brazil, explaining how a country where health is a constitutional right reaches its people through its national Universal Health System (SUS). He also shares his experience developing his undergraduate research project, “The Climatic Dragon’s Roar,” a card game created to sensitize the general public about climate change. It focuses on the consequences of natural disasters, such as heatwaves, and on the political and governmental possibilities of combating such disasters. The game sees players taking the role of city mayors in a region affected by disasters worsened by climate change. Each mayor must then play cards to mitigate the disasters’ immediate effects, adapt the city long-term, and carry out research and political development. A round starts by turning over a Disaster Card (DC), each a reimagining of Brazilian myth and representing a natural disaster affecting a city’s Quality of Life. These disasters are consequences of our misuse and disrespect of nature, leading its protectors to turn their wrath on us. During testing with different age groups, a game focused on health promotion and education was created; its participants felt excited to fight the negative effects of climate change. Leonardo Adorno is a public health graduate and researcher at the University of São Paulo’s department of Environmental Health with a FAPESP bursary, he has experience working in health management, pharmacovigilance and environmental health. During his graduation he found that communication with the public is one of the major challenges in health, thus his undergraduate research was focused on this issue. Communication is very important to him as well as climate change mitigation in cities, especially for vulnerable communities since those are the ones that will face the worst impacts of climate change related disasters in the future.