FOREWORD

Special issue - European Radon Week 2020

Jose Luis Gutierrez Villanueva1, Giorgia Cinelli2,3, Valeria Gruber4

1Radonova Laboratories AB, Sweden; 2European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy; 3Laboratory of Observations and Measurements for the Climate and the Environment, ENEA, Palermo, Italy; 4Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), Linz, Austria

 

Citation: Journal of the European Radon Association 2022, 3: 8591 http://dx.doi.org/10.35815/radon.v3.8591

Copyright: © 2022 Jose Luis Gutierrez Villanueva et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published: 04 March 2022

 

Around Europe, several radon events have been organised separately. The European Radon Association (ERA) organised an annual workshop, and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC) used to host a radon event every 2 years. Occasionally, there are standalone events like the workshop summarising the results of the MetroRADON project.

It can be difficult for people to attend multiple radon events due to limited financial and human resources along with time constraints. Therefore, in 2020, the ERA, JRC and MetroRADON were combined to form the first-ever European Radon Week in Vienna. The strategic plan of holding many events in a single week helps to ease the strain on attendees’ wallets and calendars while also reducing our impact on the environment and fighting against climate change!

European Radon Week in February 2020 was the beginning of a new era of work due to the impending pandemic. Some participants could only attend remotely, making European Radon Week one of the first hybrid workshops with 40 presentations taking place during the event, many of them via remote video conference. More than 100 persons, both on-site and remote, learned, conversed and exchanged experiences during the five days of total radon immersion. Furthermore, it confirmed that combining several radon events improves synergy and facilitates discussions between radon professionals.

The current Special Issue of the Journal of the European Radon Association, financed by the ERA, aims to spotlight the outstanding contributions from each of the three workshops held during European Radon Week. The ERA workshop focused on ‘Radon Research in Europe’. The MetroRADON lecture had the topic of ‘Harmonisation of radon measurement methodologies and radon priority areas’ and presented the results of the MetroRADON project. The JRC’s event discussed the subject of, ‘Technical solutions for displaying and communicating indoor radon data’. All in all, there is a substantial variety of topics touched in the Special Issue, from radon mapping to the European Cancer Registry; from soil radon to thoron’s influence in radon measurement; from indoor radon levels in schools to the concept of Radon Priority Areas.

European Radon Week and the Special Issue are tangible proof of the benefits of working together between associations, project partnerships and institutions.

Due to the unprecedented success of this event, the ERA organised the 2021 European Radon Week in Fribourg last autumn. Hopefully, we will have more events in 2022, 2023 and for the foreseeable future!