The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Health systems depend on infrastructure, people and supply chains that the health sector does not control, and health outcomes in turn shape labour, trust and public finance. This page sets out the main causal, physical, economic, social and ecological links, how stress travels along them, and how Health Nexus analyses them. A dependency map describes how systems are connected; it is not a forecast of what will happen.
Risk fieldWhere systemic stress concentrates across the areas GCRI works in. Illustrative levels, not findings.
Dependencies and consequences in Health Nexus describe how health and biosecurity connect to other systems through physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them toward fields such as those of Health and Biosecurity Governance and Insurance Nexus. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; it describes connections, not a forecast.
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.
| System | How health depends on it | Typical failure |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | Lighting, ventilation, imaging, refrigeration, life support and information systems | Grid outage longer than backup fuel or generator capacity allows |
| Water and sanitation | Infection control, sterilization, dialysis, cooling | Loss of pressure or contamination after floods or drought |
| Transport | Staff arrival, patient transfer, ambulance access, deliveries | Road closure, fuel shortage, public transport disruption |
| Telecommunications and data | Records, laboratory results, dispatch, telehealth | Network outage or ransomware that forces paper workarounds |
| Supply chains | Medicines, oxygen, blood, devices, protective equipment | Concentrated production, export restrictions, cold-chain breaks |
| Workforce | Clinical and support staff with scarce skills | Illness, burnout, migration, inability to travel |
Floods, heat and storms damage facilities and the utilities they rely on at the same moment that injuries and illness rise.
Crises raise costs and cut revenue for health systems, and lost trust reduces uptake of vaccination and screening long after the event.
Land-use change, wildlife trade and intensive farming shape spillover risk and antimicrobial resistance, linking health to biodiversity and food systems.
Illness removes people from work, schools and care roles, and widespread outbreaks can disrupt supply chains and essential services well beyond health. Deferred care accumulates as later disease burden. Health spending shocks reach public budgets and household finances, and health insurers and reinsurers carry part of the cost; Insurance Nexus at The Global Risks Alliance (GRA) studies how those exposures reach the industry.
These links are why health questions appear on other GCRI platforms, including Critical Infrastructure, Water Nexus and Biotechnology and Biosecurity.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interdependency | A two-way dependency between infrastructures, such as power needing telecoms for control while telecoms need power to run. |
| Cascading risk | Risk that a failure in one system or component triggers failures in others that depend on it. |
| Compound event | Two or more hazards or drivers occurring together or in sequence whose joint impact exceeds what either would cause alone, such as drought followed by intense rain; IPCC assessments use the term. |
| Dependency mapping | Tracing the people, processes, technology, facilities and suppliers a service relies on. |
Dependency analysis uses complex systems and agent-based modelling to represent facilities, staff and supply flows, probability and statistics for the likelihood of joint failures, and causal inference to separate the effect of a disruption from background trends. Every map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; see methods and uncertainty. Related topics: health system continuity and health supply chains. Back to the field overview.
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.