Disasters are often treated as isolated events—external shocks disrupting otherwise stable systems. In reality, they are processes that expose the underlying fragility of interconnected systems already under pressure. The oversimplified paradigm of risk assessment, which continues to view risk as the product of hazard, vulnerability, and exposure at a snapshot of time, space, and level, is critically inadequate.
Climate change does not create risk only; it amplifies and connects existing vulnerabilities across sectors, scales, and geographies.
We argue that while understanding systemic risk in complex systems has gained growing attention, less effort is often dedicated to understanding the system itself.
Systemic risk emerges from initial conditions, interdependencies, and feedback loops that are context-specific to the system’s typology, defined by its governing parts and function, components, and their relations.
We work to identify, anticipate, and manage compound, cascading, recursive, and systemic risks—strengthening the capacity of institutions and societies to operate under uncertainty, absorb shocks, and adapt or transform in the face of accelerating ecosphere disruptions and erosion of social capital.
Topics under Systemic Risk, Disaster, and Climate
- Cascading failures across interconnected systems
- Multi-hazard and compound risk assessment
- Global risk mapping and systemic risk pathways
- Resilience to integrated stress
- Self-organized criticality: why, when, and how?
- Threshold of systemic collapses
- Critical transition in complex systems, collapse, and chaos
- Interconnected tipping point interactions
- Conflict-induced existential risks
- Anatomy of collapse
- Early Warning Signals for approaching a tipping point
- Interdependencies and interconnectedness in civil systems
- Infrastructure failure propagation modeling
- Resilience design and operation of built infrastructures
- Criticality analysis and the built environment’s resilience metrics
- Physical vulnerability and fragility models
- Prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and transformation frameworks
- Intersectional social vulnerability analysis
- Upward-emergent and locally-led social resilience
- Natural hazard and exposure analysis
- Disaster risk governance
- Early warning systems and decision making under deep uncertainty
- Humanitarian ethics
- Social justice in disaster resilience investment
- Emission reduction pathways and carbon budgets
- Effective adaptation strategies across sectors, scales, and time
- Carbon leak, greenwashing, and maladaptation
- Climate resilience building in vulnerable communities and fragile contexts
- Analysis of adaptation and mitigation co-benefits
- Climate change accountability and justice
- Nexus of climate change and social equality
- Climate attribution and information services
- Climate action finance for loss and damage