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Healthy Solutions for the Low Carbon Economy
Guidelines for Investors, Insurers and Policy Makers
 Complex Humanitarian Emergencies: A Look Back at Katrina
Jennifer Leaning M.D., S.M.H., Harvard School of Public Health
Lecture Given on February 9, 2006
Lecturer Biography
Lecture Summary
Readings
Resources
Lecture Video (Streaming)
Powerpoint (PDF)
Biography
Jennifer Leaning, M.D., S.M.H., is professor of the practice of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health and directs the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights, based at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. She is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in the Emergency Department of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is senior advisor in international and policy studies at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
She teaches disaster management, human rights, and response to humanitarian crises. She has field experience in problems of disaster response and human rights (particularly in the Mid East, former USSR, Somalia, the African Great Lakes area, Albania, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Sudan) and has written widely on these issues. She is lead editor of Humanitarian Crises: The Medical and Public Health Response, published by Harvard University Press in 1999.
She currently serves on a number of nonprofit boards, including the Board of Directors of the American Red Cross, Massachusetts Bay Chapter, Physicians for Human Rights, and Oxfam America. Her research and policy interests include problems of international human rights and international humanitarian law, humanitarian crises, and medical ethics in practical settings of disasters and emergencies.
A founding board member of Physicians for Human Rights, she continues to serve as a member of its Board of Directors. A long-time board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, she is now a member of its Board of Sponsors. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Humane Society of the United States and the American Red Cross, Massachusetts Bay Chapter.
She received her A.B. degree from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, a Masters in demography from the Harvard School of Public Health, and her M.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She trained in internal medicine and emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and is board certified in both specialties.
Her research and policy interests include problems of international human rights and international humanitarian law, humanitarian crises, and medical ethics in practical settings of disasters and emergencies.
Summary
"We must never forget this picture," says Harvard School of Public Health Professor Jennifer Leaning. An expert on humanitarian crises, Leaning has witnessed epic calamities around the world first-hand, from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Rwanda and the Chad-Sudan border. Sadly, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina that took America by surprise was in many ways straight from the textbooks, says Leaning, who directs the Program on Humanitarian Crises and Human Rights within the School's François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. Exposing the vulnerable, she says, is "what disasters always do, particularly when they're not well managed."
Whether speaking of a poorly maintained dam threatening to crumble in Taunton, Massachusetts, or the long, bloody conflict in Darfur, Sudan, the mantra of disaster- response planners is always the same. "Crises show society speeded up," its evolution compressed into a moment in time, Leaning says. The poor and dispossessed, the weak and the sick, always suffer disproportionately. And how society responds--or doesn't--is a reflection of its values, "its way of organizing and caring for people."
Relief from government is almost always slower in coming than victims expect, owing to a combination of insufficient resources, too little advance planning, and logistical hurdles that arise amid chaos. In these respects, many believed the U.S.--the leader of the industrialized world--would perform vastly better than developing nations in a disaster. Yet its response was, as many within and outside the HSPH community noted, a catastrophe unto itself.
Readings
Kiewra K. In the Eye of the Storm. Harvard Public Health Review. Winter 2006.
Kiewra K. A Virtual Academy of Disaster Responders. Harvard Public Health Review. Winter 2006.
Kiewra K. Review. Mold, Mold, Everywhere Harvard Public Health. Winter 2006.
Resources
"Bring New Orleans Back" Urban Planning Report from http://www.bringneworleansback.org/
The Urban Land Institute. A Strategy for Rebuilding New Orleans, Louisiana.
Please peruse the following site: The Social Science Research Council's website about Hurricane Katrina: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/;
Please peruse the following site: Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School: http://hurricanekatrina.med.harvard.edu/index.php
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