How can we improve and facilitate multi-sectoral collaboration in warning and response systems for infectious diseases and natural hazards to account for their drivers, interdependencies and cascading impacts?

Abstract

Socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors have repeatedly been shown to drive emerging infectious disease risk. However, these factors remain largely excluded from surveillance, warning and response systems. Similarly, even though hazards’ impacts are vastly interconnected (e.g. climate change, flooding, droughts, tropical cyclones, heatwaves, water-borne and vector-borne diseases), warning systems tend to act and work in silos. The disconnect among sectors, disaster risk reduction and health preparedness leads to reactive systems that wait for a disaster to occur before issuing a response.