PHC systems need integrated solutions to adapt to climate impacts while ensuring they are prepared to respond to epidemics and emergencies and maintain essential health services.

Interconnected risks:

1. Climate Change: Increases the risk of extreme weather, heatwaves, and disease outbreaks.
2. Urbanization: Exacerbates conditions with overcrowded cities, poor sanitation, and pollution.
3. Globalization: Enables diseases to spread faster across borders through population movement and creates supply chain vulnerabilities.

These factors interact and amplify each other, making health emergencies more frequent, complex, and harder to control. Given these interconnected and escalating risks, there is a growing need for health systems to adopt comprehensive strategies that address multiple types of emergencies in an integrated way.

All-hazards approach:

Our all-hazards approach recognizes that while the sources of hazards may vary, they often present similar challenges to health systems, requiring a unified set of preparedness measures and response strategies. The Epidemic Ready Primary Health Care (ERPHC) framework has already laid a strong foundation for emergency preparedness and response specifically for epidemics.8

By expanding this framework beyond outbreaks, PHC facilities can strengthen their capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to a wider range of emergencies, including natural disasters, mass casualty incidents, environmental hazards, and other public health threats.