The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery (WCPCCS) will be held in Washington DC, USA, from Saturday, 26 August, 2023 to Friday, 1 September, 2023, inclusive. The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery will be the largest and most comprehensive scientific meeting dedicated to paediatric and congenital cardiac care ever held. At the time of the writing of this manuscript, The Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery has 5,037 registered attendees (and rising) from 117 countries, a truly diverse and international faculty of over 925 individuals from 89 countries, over 2,000 individual abstracts and poster presenters from 101 countries, and a Best Abstract Competition featuring 153 oral abstracts from 34 countries. For information about the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, please visit the following website: [www.WCPCCS2023.org]. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the activities related to global health and advocacy that will occur at the Eighth World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery.

Acknowledging the need for urgent change, we wanted to take the opportunity to bring a common voice to the global community and issue the Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action on Addressing the Global Burden of Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases. A copy of this Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is provided in the Appendix of this manuscript. This Washington DC WCPCCS Call to Action is an initiative aimed at increasing awareness of the global burden, promoting the development of sustainable care systems, and improving access to high quality and equitable healthcare for children with heart disease as well as adults with congenital heart disease worldwide.

Understanding the distribution and extent of suitable habitats is critical for the conservation of endangered and endemic taxa. Such knowledge is limited for many Central African species, including the rare and globally threatened Grey-necked Picathartes Picathartes oreas, one of only two species in the family Picathartidae endemic to the forests of Central Africa. Despite growing concerns about land-use change resulting in fragmentation and loss of forest cover in the region, neither the extent of suitable habitat nor the potential species’ distribution is well known. We combine 339 (new and historical) occurrence records of Grey-necked Picathartes with environmental variables to model the potential global distribution. We used a Maximum Entropy modelling approach that accounted for sampling bias. Our model suggests that Grey-necked Picathartes distribution is strongly associated with steeper slopes and high levels of forest cover, while bioclimatic, vegetation health, and habitat condition variables were all excluded from the final model. We predicted 17,327 km2 of suitable habitat for the species, of which only 2,490 km2 (14.4%) are within protected areas where conservation designations are strictly enforced. These findings show a smaller global distribution of predicted suitable habitat forthe Grey-necked Picathartes than previously thought. This work provides evidence to inform a revision of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List status, and may warrant upgrading the status of the species from “Near Threatened” to “Vulnerable”.