Health Systems Resilience
Health systems urgently need to adapt to climate change. Climate change threatens human health by increasing the demand for healthcare through both acute and chronic impacts. Acute impacts include more frequent and severe natural disasters, while chronic impacts increase disease prevalence, such as malaria, and strain essential systems by reducing water availability, food security, and air quality, while increasing heat stress and mental health challenges. At the same time, health systems themselves are vulnerable to climate change through damage to infrastructure, disrupted medical supply chains, reduced patient access, failures in supporting services such as energy, water, digital systems, and waste management, as well as workforce shortages.
The Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) in collaboration with partner institutions such as Oxford Infrastructure Analytics (OIA), Centre Population & Développement (CEPED), Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (HiGH) and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), have developed a series of health system resilience knowledge products and technical reports based on a project case study. The publications address the complexity and interconnectedness of health systems, which make health infrastructure particularly vulnerable to climate change, targeting adaptation at the system level rather than the facility level.
Contact Info
For more information on this program, or to get involved, please contact infrastructure@gca.org
Adaptation Insights – Climate-resilient health systems for sustained value chains, healthcare access and services
This Adaptation Insights report addresses how health systems can be made climate resilient to sustain value chains, healthcare services, and access to care. It introduces two complementary conceptual frameworks that provide a systematic basis for identifying disruptions and guiding adaptation. Together, they examine resilience from two perspectives: maintaining healthcare service provision, including facilities and assets, and ensuring sustained access to healthcare for patients, populations, and vulnerable groups, ultimately leading to actionable adaptation strategies.
Health Systems Disruption Analysis – Sokoto Climate Resilient Healthcare Infrastructure Project
The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) is supporting the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) in integrating climate adaptation and resilience into Sokoto State’s health system through the Sokoto Climate Resilient Healthcare Infrastructure Project.
This report demonstrates the impact of climate hazards on healthcare delivery and system functionality across Sokoto State. It identifies climate-risk hotspots affecting health facilities and analyses potential disruptions to primary, secondary, and tertiary care, including referral pathways and pharmaceutical logistics. The assessment considers structural, operational, and socio-economic factors, with a focus on vulnerable populations and regions.
Healthcare System of Systems Vulnerability
This report presents healthcare as a complex system of systems—a network of interdependent components including water, energy, waste, digital and transport services, all susceptible to climate-related hazards. This interconnectedness makes health infrastructure especially vulnerable to climate change, as disruptions in one area can trigger cascading effects across the entire system. By mapping these interdependencies, this report identifies targeted adaptation strategies to prevent such chain reactions and ensure the continuous delivery of healthcare services.
Health Systems Adaptation Options Report – Sokoto Climate Resilient Healthcare Infrastructure Project
The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) is supporting the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) in integrating climate adaptation and resilience into Sokoto State’s health system through the Sokoto Climate Resilient Healthcare Infrastructure Project.
This report identifies, evaluates, and prioritizes green and grey adaptation and resilience measures that address the key climate risks to the Sokoto Health system in Nigeria, identified as extreme heat, wildfires and pluvial flooding. The proposed adaptation measures include asset-level interventions tailored to different facility archetypes, as well as system-level strategies focused on energy resilience, asset management and lifecycle planning, road connectivity resilience, and institutional strengthening. The report also outlines an implementation roadmap spanning the immediate (0–2 years), short-term (2–5 years), and medium-term (5–15 years) horizons.
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