2024 Year-end letter from our President and CEO

Dear friends,

Thank you all for your support and partnership through what has been a major transition year for obesity as we prepare for critical agendas over the next three years. 

2024 highlights include:

World Obesity Day on 4 March

The goal of the 2024 campaign was to leverage the power of World Obesity Day to start cross-cutting conversations, by talking about ‘Obesity and …’.

We focused on three pillars of health, youth and our world to address obesity together. This ignited conversations around hundreds of related topics - diabetes and cardiovascular disease, women and children, health systems and food systems, to name a few - and communities rallied all over the world. Key highlights included the first year of ‘Walk for WOD’ and monument and building illuminations around the world; events led by WHO and UNICEF; publication of the new Lancet-WHO data on obesity; and media reach including:

• Instagram: 620k reach (up 6262% from 2023), including collaboration with WHO
• Engagement on our website from users in 199 countries
• High media reach – press reach of 6.2 billion

International Congress on Obesity 2024 – Brazil

Every two years we organise ICO with our members. For 2024, we worked with ABESO in Brazil to bring together our largest congress ever in São Paulo. Indeed, demand was so high that we closed registration three months early and opened up an online option to accommodate over 3,000 attendees – in person and online. With registrants from more than 75 countries and pre-conference workshops including a SCOPE School and INFORMAS meetings, it was a great event and a clear indication that there many more professionals working in obesity who wish to engage with our community.

Policy & Advocacy

We continued our work with WHO and UNICEF on the Global Obesity Forum, including side events and key statements at both the World Health Assembly and the UN General Assembly; youth activities on World Obesity Day; continued work on financing for NCDs speaking at the International Dialogue on Sustainable Financing for NCDs and Mental Health, hosted by World Bank; participated in 2025 UN High-level Meeting on NCDs at the 79th UN General Assembly; and co-signed or developed thought leadership pieces on obesity including ‘Let’s talk differently about obesity’ and ‘Chemical pollutants: An invisible cause of obesity?’.

SCOPE

We had another great year with SCOPE, and an even greater understanding of how much training is needed that is developed by the best experts while also being affordable and accessible. The more we travel, the more we hear how little information, if any, is given in existing medical and healthcare training programs about obesity and overweight, including management and nutrition. Thus we are increasing our reach and hosted four SCOPE Schools training for over 600 HCPs in events in São Paulo, Melbourne, Abu Dhabi and Beijing; awarded new fellowships and certifications; distributed over 1,000 Core Learning Path scholarships to HCPs across three continents, and launched a new webinar series for SCOPE credit.

Data

This year the Global Obesity Observatory had 2.4 million visits, the highest number ever and a 514% increase since 2020. Data updates included obesity prevalence, obesity-related drivers and co-morbidities, inclusion of under 5’s data for the first time, expansion of cross-national survey section, and updates to popular ranking page. Most notably, GOO had visitors from 230 countries, islands or territories. The top 10 were USA, UK, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Malaysia, Germany, Netherlands and France.

Journals

With two new Editors-in-chief having started in 2023, the Publications Committee welcomed a new Chair in 2024: Nick Finer, former EIC of Clinical Obesity. Obesity Reviews will receive approximately 500 submissions in 2024, a figure similar to 2023, and aims to promote in 2025 'invited/solicited' reviews from world thought-leaders and supplements led by these researchers. For Clinical Obesity, submissions in 2024 were 64% higher than 2023. Submitted manuscripts span from all corners of the world reflecting the journal’s global reach, while Pediatric Obesity has a team of 23 Associate Editors from 10 countries dedicated to timely and high-quality reviews. Obesity Science and Practice saw a new record high for submissions in 2024 while witnessing a nice balance between submissions from countries around the world where scholarship in obesity is developing to articles from some of the world’s most well-established thought leaders and their teams.

Membership & Governance

Our membership continues to grow, 14 new members joined in 2024, ending the year with 109 member organisations in over 125 countries and territories!

On 1 January the new three year plan will launch, the culmination of a process of consultation and inputs from members, topic experts, people living with obesity, allies working in other health-related areas, and government and multilateral colleagues. The process led to five thematic priorities that will shape our work over the coming three years: 'obesity and…' approach, focusing on the interrelationship of obesity with other issues; map and close critical gaps, including a better understanding of health and other systemic barriers and enablers via MAPPS II; address under-resourcing and fragmented approaches through integration, financing, and alignment; reframe obesity with people with lived experience at the centre; and strengthening and sustaining obesity organisations and networks.

We will celebrate this new approach on World Obesity Day 2025, where we will be focusing on coordinated action and celebrating success, and throughout the year in our policy work.

With best wishes, Simón and Johanna