Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), plastic pollution, and climate change already cost millions of lives and billions of euros every year, yet they are rarely discussed together. TULIP—Community-based engagement and interventions to stem the tide of antimicrobial-resistance spread in aquatic environments catalysed by climate change and plastic-pollution interactions—was created to close that gap.
Aquatic systems sit at the heart of this triple crisis. Rivers, lakes, and coastlines accumulate mismanaged plastic waste, pathogenic bacteria, and the climate-driven floods or heat waves that transport them. TULIP scientists are mapping these “source-to-sea” pathways to show where the risks concentrate and how they move.
The human stakes are rising quickly. AMR already rivals malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis as a leading infectious killer, while plastic production has doubled in two decades. Climate stress compounds the problem by warming water, lengthening bacterial growing seasons, and pushing untreated sewage and debris straight into waterways during extreme storms.
TULIP’s response is deliberately transdisciplinary. Ten partner institutions across Europe and Southeast Asia bring microbiology, hydrology, machine learning, social science, and policy translation under one roof. Together they are co-creating citizen-science monitoring, community interventions, and decision-support tools that quantify both environmental and health benefits. In short, TULIP turns a complicated, planetary-scale tangle into actionable knowledge and locally piloted solutions that regulators can use now.