Pandemic Risk Assessment and its Intersection with Climate Change: Needs, Opportunities, and Design Considerations

The UN Foundation, in collaboration with the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, and the US National Academy of Medicine, will hold a 2-day international workshop that will examine the scientific gaps in pandemic risk assessment, including how much and how fast pandemic risk is evolving, temporal trends and spatial distribution of risk, which human activities are the critical drivers of present and future risk, including those directly and indirectly linked to climate change, and the speed, magnitude and geographic distribution with which these drivers are shifting the frequency and severity of infectious disease outbreaks and expected losses.

The workshop will allow participants to develop and propose an assessment agenda and methodological framework that takes into consideration the breadth of infectious disease hazards, the depth of driver modeling and contribution analysis, the maturity of assessment techniques, the need for original research and new data collection (versus synthesis research), the feasibility of including mitigation estimates, and the type and cadence of analytical products.

This discussion will be informed by experts from a wide range of fields, including data science, social science, climate, extreme event modeling, and predictive analytics. The workshop discussions will be summarized in a final report.