Humanitarian Crises and Public Health Systems

Humanitarian crises—including large-scale displacement, epidemics, food insecurity, climate shocks, and armed conflict—pose profound and interlinked public health challenges. These crises evolve dynamically over time, involve multiple actors with conflicting objectives, and frequently generate unintended consequences due to feedback, delays, and accumulations.

This course introduces System Dynamics (SD) as a rigorous yet accessible framework to analyze humanitarian public health challenges. Rather than focusing on single issues in isolation, participants will learn to conceptualize crises as feedback-rich systems linking populations, health services, humanitarian response capacity, and governance structures. Using real humanitarian examples—many drawn from the instructor’s prior teaching and field-based work—participants will develop causal loop diagrams, stock-and-flow representations, and simple simulation models using Vensim or Stella.

The course emphasizes dynamic structure, feedback mechanisms, accumulation processes, and time delays present in complex humanitarian challenges. The course emphasizes learning for policy design, helping participants understand why well-intended humanitarian interventions often underperform or backfire, and how systems modeling can support more robust decision-making under uncertainty.

Core humanitarian topics covered include:

• Epidemics dynamics, disease transmission in crises, surveillance gaps, reporting delays, and behavioral responses
• Malnutrition dynamics, humanitarian supply chains, aid dependency
• Shelter provision, unintended pull effects, WASH access and health outcomes
• Protracted crises, conflict, forced displacement, migration, population dynamics
• Health service capacity, workforce burnout, service capacity, and congestion effects
• Policy resistance, delays, and unintended consequences in migration governance

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Conceptualize humanitarian crises as dynamic public health systems
• Identify feedback loops driving escalation, stabilization, or collapse
• Explain how migration emerges from broader humanitarian dynamics
• Distinguish stocks, flows, and delays in humanitarian contexts
• Develop causal loop diagrams for complex humanitarian problems
• Build simple stock-and-flow simulation models
• Use models to explore trade-offs and unintended consequences of interventions

• Basic knowledge of public health concepts
• No prior experience with System Dynamics required
• Interest in analytical, modeling-based approaches to complex social problems

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• Interactive lectures grounded in humanitarian case material
• Mental-model elicitation and comparison exercises
• Guided construction of causal loop diagrams
• Stock-and-flow mapping of humanitarian systems
• Hands-on modeling labs (Vensim / Stella)
• Small-group modeling exercises
• Group discussions using classic humanitarian paradoxes

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To get the Certificate of completion and the 1 ECTS participants must:

• Attend at least 80% of the course
• Attend the plenary offered during the first day of the course
• Actively participate in group modeling exercises
• Complete short in-class conceptual and modeling assignments

At least one facilitator will be on-site in Lugano, and some may join online. Participants are welcomed to join either on-site in Lugano, or online. If face-to-face meeting was problematic for unforeseen reasons, the course could be held online. For those on-site, the course will take place at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI).

For course pricing information, see here. Discounts are available for participants from UMICs, LMICs, PhD and Master Students, and Students and Employees from the LSS Partner Universities (SSPH+, USI, SUPSI, and SWISS TPH).