This book focuses on the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic currently dominating the agenda of global, national and local policymakers, from the perspective of the UK. This major public health crisis presents a threat which is impacting adversely on global economic structures, and exacerbating a number of pre-existing wicked issues (‘difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements, and not resolved by traditional “technical” managerial approaches to the provision of public services’; Rittel and Webber, 1973). These interlinked issues include climate change, racial justice, austerity, housing and homelessness, employment, domestic abuse, human trafficking and modern slavery.

‘The pandemic is unequal in three ways: it has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally’ (Bambra et al, 2021). Climate change, another wicked issue, identified as a major global threat to human existence, impacts disproportionately on these socioeconomic challenges, across countries and communities. The additive adverse consequences of the two global challenges of COVID-19 and climate change present significant challenges at local, national and global levels, within the geopolitical context of inequalities.

The interconnectivity and interdependence of the domains of the rainbow model of social determinants of health as described by Dahlgren and Whitehead (1991) can be used to examine the response and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, affecting people and communities around the world. The rainbow model of health described by Dahlgren and Whitehead was explored in Social Determinants of Health: Social Inequality and Wellbeing, published in 2018 by Policy Press (Bonner, 2018). In that first volume of the social determinants of health series, poor nutrition, alcohol related harm, homelessness, mental health, learning disabilities, health and wellbeing in the digital society were reviewed by practitioners, service managers and academics from a range of life and social sciences disciplines. The health and wellbeing of people at the lower end of the social gradient was viewed from psycho-socio-geopolitical perspectives in 2018, nine years into UK austerity policies launched after the global economic downturn in 2008. An important set of indicators of social inequalities in the UK, at that time, was presented in the Marmot Review (Marmot, 2010).