Integrative Societal Resilience or 'One Resilience' Approach: Towards Optimal Health and Wellbeing

Abstract

Background and Rationale Emerging pandemic threats (EPT) are recognized as real challenges to health and global security. The technical, political, socio-economic, environmental and comprehensive security challenges posed by EPTs require holistic collaborative efforts- going beyond the health sector. Lack of preparedness is anticipated to result in massive socio-economic disruptions and loss of lives, as conveyed by the West African Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks where the combination of spreading fear and uncertainty, and the imposition of movement restrictions and quarantine have heavily impacted on livelihood, business and essential services and economic activities, that have led to social devastation and unrest. EPT is just one among the challenges in attaining optimal health. Disaster threats, which are multi-hazards and multifaceted in nature- including poverty, have the potential to result in massive socio-economic disruptions and loss of lives. Such negative consequences hinge on the extent and effectiveness of sectoral and systems collaboration, which is countered by the prevalence of sectoral and disciplinary silos- silos being basically characterized as the lack of collaborations of systems or sectoral efforts and resources being separately spent on common concerns. It is believed that lack of collaboration on overlapping concerns can be magnified upon further elaboration of the potential for collaboration and synergy among systems. Therefore, ‘One Resilience’ 1 is introduced here as a proposed rallying point, movement and approach towards strategic systems’ integration for attaining optimal health. One Resilience movement may be defined as the integration of security systems capacities along areas of sectoral interdependencies and synergies for the unitive attainment of health, food/water, energy, social, environmental and disaster resilience. By this approach, multi-systems and stakeholders (including political, military, civil society organizations, private citizens etc.) impacted by a human health problem (e.g. Ebola virus infection outbreaks) are expected to work better together to address the common problem. The initiation of a One Resilience movement may be likened to the now popular One Health movement, which was kick-started through the promulgation of the twelve Manhattan Principles in 2004 2 , aiming to promote an international and interdisciplinary approach to attain optimal health for people, animals and the environment. Since then, One Health has been able to harness growing support from the human, animal and environmental health sectors.