Changing the principles that guide how we assess and respond to systemic risks: Learning from pilots

This article is based on an Ignite Stage presentation at the 2025 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. The Ignite Stage offers fast-paced, impactful talks from diverse voices working at the forefront of disaster risk reduction.

What values do you apply in daily life that guide your actions? Whether implicit or explicit, many of us have a set of values, beliefs or principles for how we lead our lives. Drawing from this idea, the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) and its members developed a set of principles that could help us redefine our understanding of risk, accelerate awareness of the risks we face, and guide transformative action needed to protect Earth's ecological systems and humanity from escalating systemic risks.

Systemic risks, from emerging technological risks, geopolitical conflict and the erosion of democracy, to pandemics, climate change, inequity and more, are intensifying. As highlighted in our report Facing Global Risks with Honest Hope, the tools used by leaders and policymakers today are glaringly insufficient. As systemic risks become more likely to spread both within and between systems, leading to global shocks, we urgently need new methods to assess and respond to them.

ASRA has developed an innovative approach to assessing systemic risks and reducing their impacts. Underpinned by a set of principles for systemic risk assessment and response, it places the critical values of the sanctity of life (including non-human life), justice, multiple ways of knowing, and transformation, among others, at the heart of both risk assessment and risk reduction.

The genesis of the principles began with ASRA network members, a transdisciplinary group of risk practitioners working together to radically rethink risk. Eleven principles were carefully crafted to guide systemic risk assessment and response. The methodology appeared to be increasingly relevant in an ever-changing world, where our effectiveness depends on adapting to dynamic, complex contexts and working with deep uncertainty.

In 2024, ASRA supported eight ambitious pilots to test our emergent methodology across diverse socioeconomic and political environments. These covered different governance levels, from global approaches to navigate existential catastrophes, to considering options to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in the United Republic of Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and slums in São Paulo, Brazil.

Some critical insights relating to systemic risk assessment included a deep engagement with ASRA's framework across pilots. We learned that systems mapping isn't intuitive or easy, but can be helpful in spotting system interconnections, and understanding the strength of those connections and related feedback loops. Luckily, some handy tools available online help us in undertaking systems mapping collaboratively.

In terms of systemic risk response (SRR), which ASRA defines as any deliberate action to mitigate, prepare for, adapt to and transform away from the harms of systemic risks, a set of criteria were discussed and applied to different existing risk reduction activities. Key insights here were the importance of having accompanying examples of existing SRRs that demonstrate SRR criteria in action.

SRR criteria help in imagining what responses would have been if the criteria had been applied to past crises. For example, how would responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have changed if we implemented criteria related to compassion and justice? The criteria also helped identify gaps where existing responses could be enhanced.

Interestingly, an unexpected outcome was that the criteria also served to navigate tensions between different stakeholders - for example, through storytelling about how criteria related to individual and collective agency, complexity or transformation criteria show up in people's work.

A cross-cutting lesson from across all pilots was that the language used around systemic risk is complex and difficult to grapple with. Given systemic risks are hard to understand by their very nature, language is a barrier that we can seek to actively address. We need understandable terms to enhance understanding of systemic risks and related terminology. Accessibility and reducing barriers for diverse communities, especially those at the sharp end of systemic risk, is critical to successfully implementing and mainstreaming new approaches - while navigating the complexity of systemic risks and related trade-offs involved. This is not a mere simplification exercise, but a deliberate act of inclusion, translation and democratization of knowledge.

We cannot act in isolation. Actions to address systemic risks and how they manifest in a community must be done in partnership, placing the needs and experience of the most vulnerable at the heart of those assessments and responses. New tools and approaches to navigate systemic risk are crucial - we need to know how and where an approach can prevent cascading and compounding risks across a range of systems.

That is why I was so excited to discuss this at UNDRR's Global Platform, followed by the Current of Change: New Horizons in Systemic Risk symposium, hosted by ASRA. There we unveiled an online demo version of STEER (Systemic Tool for Exploring and Evaluating Risks) - a first-of-its-kind tool for systemic risk assessment and response, formed through the experience of the pilots from last year. 

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Sarah Hendel-Blackford is the Director of Systemic Risk Policy and Response at ASRA. Sarah has over 20 years' experience in climate change mitigation and adaptation in large international organizations that span both public and private sectors, and has designed and delivered adaptation masterclasses for megacities, global urban adaptation academies and businesses. Sarah is also a supervisory board member of Climate-KIC, a European knowledge and innovation community.