Society faces immense challenges when natural hazards and disease outbreaks co-occur. Disasters associated with natural hazards are often also public health emergencies. For example, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate response phase after natural hazard events was often complicated, because of travel restrictions and local lockdown measures. This arguably led to increased exposure to other hazards such as earthquakes (e.g. the 2020 Zagreb earthquake). Natural hazards can also trigger the outbreak of diseases, such as cholera and diarrhoea outbreaks following the devastating floods in Pakistan in August 2022. The co-occurrence of natural hazards and diseases creates cascading effects that worsen the overall impact. A limited understanding of these cascading impacts creates operational, ethical, and decision-making challenges for society, disaster management, and aid organisations.
Recent events underscore the critical need to enhance our scientific understanding of the complex interactions between natural hazards, society, public health and disease outbreaks. Equally pressing is the imperative to advance our modelling capabilities, enabling us to capture the nuances of risk stemming from multi-hazard scenarios and disease outbreaks. Additionally, we must deepen our grasp of the synergies and trade-offs inherent in disaster risk reduction measures when addressing this multifaceted challenge.
This session serves as a platform to bolster our understanding of the convergence of disasters, public health and disease outbreaks. We invite abstracts studying all aspects of this co-occurrence, such as cascading impacts, including health impacts that follow from natural hazards, difficulties that arise when natural hazards and diseases coincide, and challenges and lessons for adaptation management facing natural hazards and diseases. We are particularly keen to see new developments in measuring - for example through integration of remote sensing with public health and socio-demographic datasets - and modelling these interactions. Discussions on the compounding effect of climate change on health outcomes, and the spatial and temporal variability of exposures and vulnerabilities to these complex hazards are also strongly encouraged.