Introduction: Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of infectious disease outbreaks and weather-related disasters. However, agencies are often separated in institutional focus, either on infectious diseases or disaster management, but not both, which limits capacity to respond when they happen together. This project aimed to explore how to prepare for and respond to overlapping infectious disease outbreaks and weather-related disasters in the state of Victoria, Australia. Methods: Qualitative interviews were conducted with 20 stakeholders in infectious diseases and/or emergency management, including researchers, government workers, practitioners, and citizen scientists. Interviews focused on each stakeholder’s imagined worst case, best case, and most likely case for how disasters and infectious disease outbreaks could overlap in the next 5 years. Interviews were thematically analyzed using strategic foresight methods to create future scenarios. Strategic foresight methods seek to give readers a ‘memory of the future’ to act upon in the present. Participatory workshops were held with government agencies to examine the scenarios against existing policies and practices. Results: Three future scenarios were created, including overlaps in disasters and infectious disease outbreaks that were coincidental (High Pathogen Avian Influenza outbreak and extreme flooding co-occur), cascading (bushfires lead to animal movement and an outbreak of Tularaemia occurs) and compounding (extreme heatwave and Hendra virus outbreak exacerbate each other and become harder to manage). Workshops examined pathways for managing these overlaps, identified barriers and facilitators for organizational change, and highlighted the importance of cross-agency collaboration. Conclusion: It is imperative to address the complexity of overlapping infectious disease outbreaks and disasters. This study underscores the importance of considering multiple hazards in scenario planning and capacity building and illustrates ways of working with different stakeholder groups to plan for the future. The present findings further highlight the possibility for creative governance among agencies facing uncertainty and complex risks.
Leppold et al. (Sun,) studied this question.