Building Resilience of Health Systems in Pacific Island LDCs to Climate Change

National priorities
The Vanuatu National Sustainable Development Plan (NSDP) 2016-2030 is based on cultural values and aims to preserve a healthy environment, build resilience, and ensure all citizens have access to high-quality public services. The NSDP goals are presented within three pillars, Society, Environment, and Economy, which are all underpinned by culture. The reality of climate change and its impacts on development overwhelmingly evident in Vanuatu and are reflected in the NSDP, which highlights enhanced resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change and natural disasters as a key aspiration. Specific climate change related goals that are relevant for the health sector come under the Environment pillar and include food and nutrition security, as well as climate and disaster resilience.

Additionally, Vanuatu’s Health Sector Strategy (HSS) 2017-2020 defines the governments’ vision for health sector development to protect and promote healthy populations and is linked with the overarching NSDP 2016-2030. Building from the previous HSS, which concluded in 2016, the HSS has three main strategic goals, including strengthening health service management and information systems, improving population access to health services through integrated planning, and fair allocation of resources, strengthening collaborative action across sectors and within the health sector to create a healthier environmental and address major health issues. The HSS has taken tremendous strides to promote collaborative action across sectors and within the health sector to address major health issues, many of which are affected by climate change. Specifically, Outcome 3.1.2 states: “Potential health impacts of climate change and the actions required to deal with these are known and incorporated in program development” with the action to “form a Task Force to identify health impacts of climate change and ensure these are addressed in national cross-sectoral forums and programs.” This presents the opportunity to align with the HSS and refocus on investing in national health priorities in a more coordinated fashion integrating climate risk and resilience considerations, towards supporting improvements in health financing, human resources, health information, health services, medicines and supplies, good governance and leadership.

The Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Policy (CCDRR) 2016-2030 provides an overarching vision for building a climate change resilient community, environment, and economy in Vanuatu. Six strategic priorities are presented including governance; finance; knowledge & information; climate change adaptation & disaster risk reduction; low carbon development; and response & recovery, as well as cross cutting such as capacity building, gender and social inclusion, mainstreaming, partnerships, and a multi-hazard approach. Overall, the CCDRR Policy provides a framework that emphasizes the need for clear communication and coordination at all levels of government and across sectors and communities. Many of the actions described in the document are critical for building climate-resilient health systems, such as increased capacity for climate change and disaster risk reduction data-analysis and research for decision-makers and development of early-warning systems.