The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Health security is the capacity of a population and its health system to anticipate, absorb and recover from threats to health, whether those threats come from pathogens, heat, pollution, conflict, infrastructure failure or broken supply chains. It sits where epidemiology, health services research, environmental science and systems engineering meet. This page explains what the field studies, why it matters to society and how it connects to other risks.
Risk fieldWhere systemic stress concentrates across the areas GCRI works in. Illustrative levels, not findings.
The Health Nexus field covers health security and human wellbeing through resilient health systems and cross-sector evidence. Experts in it study questions such as health system continuity and One Health, with methods such as epidemiology and public health science as well as molecular and life sciences. Its counterparts at GRF and GRA look at the same systems through governance and finance.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Most systemic shocks eventually show up as a health outcome: heat as cardiovascular and renal illness, floods as injury and waterborne disease, food price spikes as malnutrition, power failures as deaths among people dependent on home medical devices. The health system is at once a victim of these shocks and the service society relies on to absorb them.
Health systems are also unusually sensitive to load. Hospitals typically run close to capacity, staff are hard to replace at short notice, and many inputs, from oxygen to specialist medicines, have few substitutes. When demand rises at the same moment that supply falls, quality of care can degrade quickly and the harm extends to people with no direct exposure to the original hazard.
Who is exposed, who is vulnerable and how illness is distributed, using surveillance, cohort and case data. See health equity and environmental health.
How infections emerge, spread and are detected, and how human, animal and environmental health interact. See infectious threats and One Health.
Whether facilities, workforce, supplies and information systems keep essential services running under stress. See health system continuity, healthcare infrastructure and health supply chains.
The information systems and data governance that modern care depends on, and their failure modes. See digital health risk.
Health depends on energy, water, transport, telecommunications, food and finance, and it feeds back into labour supply, public trust and public budgets. Dependencies and consequences maps those links in detail.
The field is shared across the Consortium: Health and Biosecurity Governance at The Global Risks Forum (GRF) looks at how it is governed, and Insurance Nexus at The Global Risks Alliance (GRA) at how health and catastrophe exposures reach the insurance industry. The health and biosecurity field gateway lists every platform in the field.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| One Health | An integrated approach that aims to balance and optimise the health of people, animals and ecosystems, as the Quadripartite organizations define it. |
| International Health Regulations | The legally binding WHO instrument that sets countries' duties to detect, assess, report and respond to public health events of international concern. |
| Health emergency and disaster risk management | The WHO framework for reducing health risks and consequences of emergencies through prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. |
| Systemic risk | Risk arising from the interactions and dependencies within and between systems, where a shock can propagate and threaten the functioning of the whole. |
The field relies on epidemiology, statistics, causal inference, complex systems modelling and data stewardship. Each method's assumptions and limits are set out on methods and uncertainty.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.