Health system resilience is the capacity to keep delivering care on an ordinary day — and to hold when a shock hits (Kruk et al., The Lancet, 2015). That capacity is being tested like never before: global health funding fell by roughly a fifth in 2025 alone, even as climate shocks, disease outbreaks, and conflict pile pressure onto already-strained systems. The answer isn't another disease-specific program — it's investing in the workforce, financing, and country-led systems that every health outcome ultimately depends on. Get that right, and universal health coverage, pandemic preparedness, and climate adaptation stop being competing priorities and become the same investment. This is the case I've spent nearly 15 years building — one health worker, one system, one country at a time.

Why it matters now

The case for investing in resilience has grown more urgent as the resources available for global health have contracted. OECD preliminary data show official development assistance fell roughly 23% in real terms in 2025 — the steepest single-year decline on record — while tracking by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows development assistance for health falling by a comparable margin over the same period, driven substantially by reductions in U.S. funding. At the same time, countries are contending with simultaneous pressures — disease outbreaks, climate-related health shocks, conflict, and the resurgence of diseases once thought controlled — that fall disproportionately on systems least equipped to absorb them.

What resilience requires

The evidence points consistently to a small set of mechanisms:

• Workforce investment. A trained, retained, and well-supported health workforce is repeatedly identified in the literature as a primary resilience mechanism — the difference between a system that adapts under strain and one that collapses (Kruk et al.; Haldane et al.; WHO Africa Health Workforce Investment Charter, 2024).
• Financing that reaches core systems, not just single diseases. Analyses of pandemic preparedness, non-communicable disease, and climate-adaptation financing consistently find that disease-specific, donor-driven funding leaves the underlying system — the thing every disease response depends on — under-resourced (World Bank/WHO G20 Joint Finance & Health Task Force; UNEP Adaptation Gap Report, 2025).
• Country-led design. Systems are more resilient when the countries operating them, not external donors, set priorities and hold long-term responsibility for their health workforce and infrastructure.
• Climate-informed planning. WHO's Measuring the Climate Resilience of Health Systems (2021) framework and the Rockefeller Foundation's COP28 Guiding Principles on Financing Climate and Health Solutions both treat climate resilience as inseparable from health system resilience more broadly, not a separate track — a distinction that matters because climate adaptation funding for health remains a small fraction of total climate finance (Alcayna et al., PLOS Global Public Health, 2023).

The stakes

Health system resilience underpins goals that are often discussed separately: universal health coverage, pandemic preparedness, climate adaptation, and health security all depend on the same underlying infrastructure. A system built to withstand shocks is also, in practice, a system capable of delivering everyday care more equitably. The two are not competing priorities — investment in one is investment in the other.

On September 9, 2026, Dr. Kerry was appointed the Director General 's Special Envoy for Health Resilience for the World Health Organization. 

Building on her previous role as Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health, this new position expands the remit to champion stronger, more resilient health systems: systems that can meet everyday health needs while preventing crises from becoming catastrophes. There is a powerful opportunity to help align the many too-often-competing conversations in health in the last decade and to establish an ambitious agenda for health as a means to economic advancement, job creation and political strength.  

For Dr. Kerry, the appointment is an important evolution of the more than a decade of work alongside governments and partners to strengthen health systems by investing in the people who save lives. It affirms the country-led approach that Seed Global Health and partners have championed and helps to solidify the role resilient health systems play in our world.  

That vision is simple: resilient health systems are built through sustained investment in health workers, national institutions, and country-led priorities, with partners aligned behind national plans. As the global health landscape continues to evolve and there are continued threats to it with climate change, funding cuts and pandemics for example, Dr. Kerry believes this approach has never been more important.  

In this role, Dr. Kerry will work to advance health resilience as the foundation for universal health coverage, climate resilience, and pandemic preparedness, while helping shift how the world prioritizes and finances stronger health systems.