Climate Resilience and Global Pandemics: The Southern African Perspective

Climate change increases the risk of global pandemics, whose outbreaks pose numerous challenges to communities the world over. Africa and Southern Africa, in particular, have not been spared from such impactful adverse events of climate-related events. Such a situation has entailed the need for communities to be more resilient to these pandemics, whose frequency is expected to increase due to climate change. However, there is generally limited scholarship literature on a comprehensive assessment framework for climate resilience and global pandemics. The current study relies on a systematic review of the literature of 60 articles drawn from multidisciplinary academic databases covering 2001–2023. Results show that factors affecting the resilience to pandemics in a changing climate can be categorised into four dimensions: organisational, economic, social and demographic. The review highlights examples of factors in these four categories. On the basis of such climate change resilience mechanisms to pandemics, this chapter establishes an integrated assessment framework that scholars and researchers utilise to ascertain climate change resilience to pandemics.