Safer environments in an interconnected world
By Liz Isaac
Cambridge Zero and the Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC brought together eight researchers from across the University in early November to explore a critical question:
How do we build safer environments when everything (climate, health, housing, agriculture, and disease) is interconnected?
What emerged was a powerful consensus: key complex systems are what everyone who spoke seemed to be looking at. Nothing occurs in isolation, and issues must be looked at as vital parts of complex systems, packed with non-linear patterns. The intricacies of context must be acknowledged and taken into account when exploring an issue.
From meningitis to wheat fungi, from hospital resilience to housing retrofit in Cambridge, eight speakers from entirely different disciplines had arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. Three key themes threaded through every presentation: climate change as the great driver, multiplier and pressuriser; the power of ripple effects where even small changes can strengthen resilience; and the reality that while solutions exist, barriers (from data gaps to political priorities to money) remain formidable.
Climate change: the great driver, multiplier and pressuriser
Dr Gabriel Okello, from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said a phrase that I felt anchored the whole day “climate change is a great multiplier”. The reality highlighted by each researcher, in each talk is that our rapidly changing climate is not just an environmental issue; it's a driver, multiplier, and pressuriser of everything else. They used a striking comparison to illustrate invisible threats: we can tell which water not to drink by looking at it, but we can never tell which air not to breathe.
Dr Okello's talk focused on air quality and non-communicable diseases, showing how climate change amplifies existing problems, stretches health systems thin, worsens disease conditions, and pressures communities already living on the edge. It's not distant or abstract. It's immediate, structural, and deeply human.
This framing echoed throughout the day. Climate change exacerbates key issues that facilitate or worsen the issues that lead to increases in infectious disease occurrence, or indeed some chronic disease incidence and severity. And crucially, this threat is there for all biotic life.
For people, Molly Cliff from the Department of Veterinary Medicine demonstrated how climate shapes disease through their work on meningococcal meningitis in the Sahel. Disease patterns follow environmental factors like dust, humidity, and temperature. Cases rise during dry seasons, but the relationship isn't straightforward. It's influenced by regional variables and human displacement. Environmental conditions, human movement, and microbial behaviour are all interwoven.
Prof Ronita Bardhan, from the Department of Architecture, drew connections between climate, indoor heat, and vector-borne disease in housing design, particularly in hot climates and low-resource settings. Climate change increases both heat stress and mosquito-borne disease risk simultaneously.
For animals and people together, Dr Dorien Braam from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the World Health Organization showed how climate-driven floods, droughts, and land degradation force people and animals to move, creating new disease transmission routes. Their research in Pakistan and the Horn of Africa revealed what happens when humanitarian systems fail to account for the human-animal bond. When relief camps exclude pets and livestock, many people refuse to enter. Instead, they build informal settlements nearby so they can stay with their animals. But these makeshift camps fall outside official aid networks, meaning residents can't access food, medicine, or other essentials. Meanwhile, the animals move across borders, creating new ecological overlaps and potential spillover routes for zoonotic disease.
For plants, Dr Jacob Smith from the Department of Plant Sciences showed the same pattern. Their work models how wheat fungal disease spores travel across regions in Africa and South Asia using atmospheric and aerobiological frameworks. Climate conditions (wind, rain, temperature) drive these processes. Crop resilience underpins food security, livelihoods, and ecological stability. When crops fail, everything connected to them falters.
Across all forms of biotic life, the message was consistent: climate change affects every living system we depend upon.
See Dr Jacob Smith discuss Early warning systems for wheat disease in the video below.
Ripple effects: small changes, strengthened systems
A second theme emerged across multiple presentations: ripple effect issues sometimes require gradual or ripple effect solutions. Even small changes to what already exists can make an impact in adapting to and mitigating and minimising the effect of climate change on the issues within these ultra-complex, non-linearly connected systems.
Making sense of the connections and improved awareness of the interconnectivity and embracing and strengthening even the smaller bits of systems can make things more resilient. Sometimes focusing on the components can actually improve resilience.
Dr Tom Bashford, from the Engineering Design Centre, illustrated this through hospital resilience. Centralised systems, they explained, are less resilient because if one thing goes, the Jenga tower falls. But distributed systems work differently. Focusing on health at every stage and instance (like knowledge of where to get help) can save lives and help systems weather the storm of change a bit better. Strengthening smaller components and ensuring knowledge is spread throughout creates resilience that centralised systems lack.
Solutions do not lie solely in all new things. Using and adapting what is already there can make significant changes.
Lucy Bruzzone, from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, demonstrated this through retrofit (adapting existing buildings to improve energy efficiency and climate resilience). British housing stock is among the least efficient in Europe, and climate change is making flooding, subsidence, and overheating increasingly costly. They made a compelling case: retrofit should be seen as investment, not cost. Improving homes has cascading benefits for health, productivity, and economic stability. Adaptation isn't optional, and the solutions already exist if policy, business, and communities align.
Dr Bashford's emphasis on working with existing hospital infrastructure and Bruzzone's focus on retrofitting existing housing both illustrated the same principle: transformation doesn't always require starting from scratch.
Prof Bardhan's research showed how solutions can address multiple challenges simultaneously. Interventions for mosquito prevention can also improve indoor heat stress. A single change ripples outward, strengthening multiple parts of the system at once.
This principle applies even to how we engage communities. Dr Okello spoke about making sure you go with solutions in mind. Actually showing up and helping (not just studying) builds trust in communities that can then be studied and learned from. Small acts of genuine support create ripples of cooperation and resilience.
Solutions exist, but barriers remain
While solutions exist, the third theme was sobering: there are so many barriers. And they're systemic, not technical.
The data gap
Prof Bardhan highlighted incomplete or inaccessible data as a challenge that creates blind spots in decision-making. This wasn't unique to one field. Like everyone, they acknowledged the data gap as a fundamental barrier to implementation. Without comprehensive data (on disease patterns, housing conditions, environmental exposures, or community behaviours), solutions remain incomplete, and inequalities between the Global North and South deepen.
Participation and trust
Participation emerged as a significant barrier. Bruzzone stated that even if people are offered interest-free loans, people won't retrofit their homes. Dr Aiora Zabala, from the Department of Land Economy, alluded to the fact that payment for participation is a big factor. Around 67% of England's land is used for food production, and how we manage that space affects everything from carbon storage to disease emergence.
They spoke about regenerative agriculture and nature-based solutions, but also about why change is so difficult. Information alone isn't enough. Even financial incentives don't guarantee participation. The real challenge is context: each system, community, and landscape requires its own mix of approaches, shaped by the people who experience the issue personally, in that place being looked at, every single day.
Dr Okello reinforced this: building trust through actually helping and bringing implementable solutions to the table creates the foundation for change.
Planning permissions and systemic failures
In the final discussion, speakers confronted additional barriers. Planning permissions are huge issues. Ownership structures in housing create a "principal agent problem" where those most affected by poor infrastructure aren't the ones making decisions. Imported architectural styles (like glass-heavy buildings in hot climates) worsen local conditions because context isn't considered.
Big agencies failing to acknowledge the interconnectivity of things emerged as another barrier. Prioritising human or animal health without realising you need to take care of the health of the environment and our ecosystems too. You cannot bolster biotic life health and minimise the damage of zoonotic disease without maintaining ecosystem health.
Money: the elephant in the room
Money matters in a huge, huge way. Everyone mentioned money. Everyone sort of half acknowledged that while solutions exist (retrofit techniques, distributed hospital systems, regenerative agriculture, early warning systems for disease), money, political agendas and shifts in administrations in places and priority shifts from those sociopolitical and economic things have a colossal impact on implementation of mitigation and adaptation solutions.
Political priorities shift. Administrations change. Funding streams dry up or redirect. These sociopolitical and economic factors ripple through every system, affecting what gets researched, what gets built, what gets adapted, and ultimately, whose health and safety gets prioritised.
We need a systems-wide approach
The Safe Environments symposium crystallised a fundamental shift in how we need to approach complex challenges. We need a systems-wide approach and we need systems-wide awareness and thinking. We need to see issues as part of those systems and see issues as subject to cascading, interlinking risks.
Climate change pressures health systems. Health systems impact housing. Housing affects energy use and disease transmission. Land use influences carbon storage and pathogen spillover. Each element connects to the next in non-linear, sometimes unpredictable ways.
The researchers gathered at the Maxwell Centre on 6th November came from different disciplines, studied different organisms, and focused on different scales (from individual buildings to continental disease patterns). But they all arrived at the same conclusion: we cannot work in silos anymore.
Eight speakers, two sessions, one shared horizon. What united everyone wasn't a single solution, but a shared recognition that complexity demands connection, and that even small changes (when placed strategically within these interconnected systems) can create ripples of resilience.
Event organised by Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC and Cambridge Zero