Health Emergency Disaster Risk Management: Enabling Whole-of-Society Action to Reduce Risk
Authors: Murray Virginia , Mayner Lidia , Abrahams Jonathan 
Published: October 2024

The widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergencies and disasters on people’s health and well-being has necessitated an increasingly recognized role of health systems in preventing, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from all types of emergencies. The growing appreciation of the nature of cascading and compound systemic risks has led to the adoption of a set of principles and approaches to disaster risk management, emphasizing the development and sustainability of capacities and systems that apply an all-hazards approach and a whole-of-society collaboration across various disciplines and sciences, including public health.

The cause to bring a stronger focus to health in multisectoral disaster risk management has been reflected in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, which was one of the landmark agreements adopted by the United Nations in 2015 that form the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. (The other frameworks include the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development.) The Sendai Framework also reinforced the inclusion of natural, biological, human-induced, and other hazards within the scope of disaster risk reduction and stated the need “to strengthen technical and scientific capacity to capitalize on and consolidate existing knowledge and to develop and apply methodologies and models to assess disaster risks, vulnerabilities and exposure to all hazards.” The management of systemic health risks associated with these hazards requires the performance of many functions in health and other sectors that are brought together in the form of systems, programs, and plans that facilitate a series of joint actions within and across disciplines and sectors, and these are described in the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (EDRM) Framework published in 2019.

As a driver for managing these risks and building these partnerships and networks between health and the wider sciences, the UNDRR-ISC Sendai Hazard Definition and Classification Review provides a globally newly agreed resource. This report and its 302 Hazard Information Profiles describe terminologies that can be used by a range of users working in disaster risk reduction, emergency management, climate change, and, increasingly, sectoral actors, including the health sector, who are pursuing sustainable development. The application of common terminology with a shared understanding of the definitions and descriptions of hazards will provide a strong foundation for the engagement of the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary partnerships and networks needed to advance risk knowledge and joint action for the management of compound and complex risks. As another driver, United Nations agreements on specific hazards such as the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a multilateral environmental agreement that addresses specific human activities that are contributing to widespread mercury pollution, provide globally adopted approaches that aim to reduce harm at all levels across society.

In the negotiation of the Sendai Framework and through other initiatives, such as in One Health, the International Health Regulations, published in 2015 and the development of the WHO Health EDRM Framework, public health has collaborated with the multisectoral and multidisciplinary disaster risk reduction community to shape global policy and guidance. The participation of the health sector in producing agreed-on definitions and descriptions of hazards in the Hazard Information Profiles has facilitated knowledge sharing on health implications of hazards including biological hazards that can benefit wider disaster risk management science. Building on this work, there are also opportunities to strengthen partnerships and the public health understanding of these terminologies and the wider range of hazards that can affect health and enable the application of health EDRM. By applying public health knowledge and skills and common approaches across sectors, based on shared terminology, the bridges between public health and the science relating to the all-hazards approach can be strengthened. These partnerships will help reduce health risks and wider socioeconomic impacts of emergencies and disasters, aligned with Winslow’s description of public health in 1920 as “the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of [the whole of] society”.