Climate change, migration and health systems resilience: Need for interdisciplinary research

Abstract

Climate change is one of today's major challenges, among the causes of population movements and international migration. Climate migrants impact health systems and how they respond and adapt to their needs and patterns. But to date, the resilience of health systems in the context of climate change has been little explored. The purpose of this article is to show the importance of studying, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the relationships between climate change, migration, and the resilience of health systems. Resilience is an old concept, notably in the field of psychology, and is increasingly applied to the study of health systems. Yet, no research has analysed the resilience of health systems in the context of climate change. While universal health coverage is a major international goal, little research has to date focused on the existing links between climate, migration, health systems and resilience. We propose an interdisciplinary approach relying on the concept of health system resilience to study adaptive and transformative strategies to articulate climate change, migration and health systems. © 2019 Ridde V et al.