Measuring The Climate Resilience Of Health Systems

The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.

The stresses associated with climate change are expected to be felt keenly as human population grows to a projected 9 billion by the middle of this century, increasing the demand for resources and supporting infrastructure. Therefore, information to assess vulnerabilities to climate change is needed to support policies and investments designed to increase resilience in human and Earth systems. There are currently many observing systems that capture elements of how climate is changing, for example, direct measurements of atmospheric and ocean temperature. Although those measurements are essential for understanding the scale and nature of climate change, they do not necessarily provide information about the impacts of climate change on humans that are especially relevant for political and economic planning and decision making. Monitoring Climate Change Impacts tackles the challenge of developing an illustrative suite of indicators, measurements (and the locations around the globe where the measurements can be applied), and metrics that are important for understanding global climate change and providing insight into environmental sustainability. Eight panels provided input on: cryosphere, land-surface and terrestrial ecosystems, hydrology and water resources, atmosphere, human health and other dimensions, oceans (both physical and biological/chemical), and natural disasters. The book also provides an illustrative set of metrics that are likely to be affected by climate change over the next 20-25 years and, when taken together, can potentially give advance warning of climate-related changes to the human and environment systems.

The health sector is known to be one of the major contributors towards the greenhouse gas emissions causing the climate crisis, the greatest health threat of the 21st century. This volume positions the health sector as a leader in the fight against climate change and explores the role of the health system in climate policy action. It delivers an overview of the linkages between climate change and the health sector, with chapters on the impact of climate change on health, its connection to pandemics, and its effects on food, nutrition and air quality, while examining gendered and other vulnerabilities. It delves into the different operational aspects of the health sector in India and details how each one can become climate-smart to reduce the health sector’s overall carbon footprint, by looking at sustainable procurement, green and resilient healthcare infrastructure, and the management of transportation, energy, water, waste, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and plastics in healthcare. Well supplemented with rigorous case studies, the book will be indispensable for students, teachers, and researchers of environmental studies, health sciences and climate change. It will be useful for healthcare workers, public health officials, healthcare leaders, policy planners and those interested in climate resilience and preparedness in the health sector. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book highlights the vulnerability of healthcare buildings in the context of climate change-triggered extreme weather events (EWEs) and the case for mitigation. With a concise discussion on climate change and its consequences in the form of such events, a cost model and equations that register losses and help quantify them are then presented. The model can be used to estimate the significant potential loss that might occur during an EWE and help healthcare facilities prepare for them. The book analyses cases of major EWEs in India over the last two decades and collates the data available into various categories. Through this research the authors have developed a framework which assists healthcare facilities with a detailed calculation of value losses, both tangible and intangible. The framework can be used to assess the impacts on healthcare buildings in terms of disruption of services so that appropriate decisions related to the resilience in healthcare planning can be taken into consideration. Thus, the book is useful for directing planning and design processes aimed at continuity of service and building resilience to perform in the face of natural disaster and extreme weather. The purpose of this book is to prompt facilities planners and healthcare facilities to prepare to respond to EWEs through the planning and design process in a rational manner. Built infrastructure professionals such as architects and engineers, policy makers, and academics with an interest in disasters, risk and climate change will all find this book to be key reading.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

The Routledge Handbook on Climate Change and Health System Sustainability takes the reader on a journey to understand the interconnectedness of human health, climate change, and healthcare systems. The book begins by exploring how climate change is affecting human health through the increasing frequency of natural disasters, such as bush fires, droughts and heatwaves, and the emergence of new infectious diseases, such as the SARS-CoV2 virus, all of which drive up demand for health services that are already heavily burdened by increasing rates of chronic diseases and ageing populations. Chapters then turn to the contribution of the healthcare system itself to climate change— explaining how current clinical practices, including wasteful care of low value, create an unsustainable carbon footprint and threaten the very viability of healthcare systems. Throughout the volume, descriptions of practical solutions and implemented case studies are used to illustrate the feasibility of taking action in the real world of the healthcare delivery ecosystem. Bringing together a mix of forward-thinking environmental and health researchers, policymakers, leaders, managers, clinicians, patients, and health industry leaders to clarify the current state and future of sustainable healthcare systems, this book will be of interest to researchers and policymakers of climate and health systems.

This publication, prepared jointly by the WHO, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, considers the public health challenges arising from global climate change and options for policy responses, with particular focus on the health sector. Aspects discussed include: an overview of historical developments and recent scientific assessments; weather and climate change; population vulnerability and the adaptive capacity of public health systems; the IPCC Third Assessment report; tasks for public health scientists; the health impacts of climate extremes; climate change, infectious diseases and the level of disease burdens; ozone depletion, ultraviolet radiation and health; and methodological issues in monitoring health effects of climate change.