The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted sentinels’ essential role. Hong-Kong’s surveillance system predicted the expansion of SARS and the H5N1 flu. But in 2019, sentinels were unable to detect in time the emergence of a new virus. The sentinel’s all three roles failed: detect the threat in time, identify the tipping point at which time the potential risk is present and finally sound the alarm to trigger a mobilization.

At iGLOBES, an interdisciplinary project has been on-going since 2018 on the role of sentinels, including their territorial dimension, in the face of different types of threats, notably climate change. For further reading...