Systemic risk

The report examines pathways to limit and reverse1.5°C overshoot. While limiting warming to 1.5°C remains central to the Paris Agreement, current policies and near-term trajectories say exceeding this threshold is now widely considered unavoidable.

Zambia’s 2024 drought exposed chronic infrastructure, water and sanitation failures in Mazyopa, fuelling a cholera outbreak and disproportionate impacts on women. Community advocacy is now driving demands for long-term resilience investments.

The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

High temperatures cause dehydration and fatigue and impair attention, judgment, balance and reaction time. Research shows that heat increases injuries seemingly unrelated to temperature. patterns consistent with diminished cognition and attention.

The report uses an exploratory comparative analysis of adaptation governance across selected countries and US states to examine both the recognition of systemic risks.

This report explores how, and to what degree, adaptation policies and governance arrangements are beginning to acknowledge and respond to the systemic nature of climate change.

This study aims to produce structured storylines and knowledge graphs for over 3,000 global disaster events by processing news articles through a RAG pipeline combining the power of LLMs for text generation and the semantic extraction of factual knowledge

This work presents a climate change-informed modeling framework for assessing the inoperability of interdependent critical infrastructures exposed to NHs.

Extreme heat exposes the deep structural interdependence between water and energy systems, while also revealing the limits of traditional sector-based risk management.

This expert report examines how digital infrastructure, now central to essential services such as healthcare, finance, and emergency response, is creating new forms of systemic risk through increasing interdependence.

The report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and ARU warns that biodiversity loss, climate shocks and geopolitical conflict are disrupting the food system, risking catastrophic impacts for the financial system and for society as a whole.

In a period of unprecedented risk complexity, the insurance industry can help transform systemic uncertainty into a foundation for sustainable growth.

This study shows how COVID-19, floods, and cholera interacted in Malawi to produce cascading social, economic, and governance impacts, while also revealing the value of adaptive social protection and multi-hazard risk management.

Extreme climate-related disasters create interconnected cascading impacts across sectors and regions, making it essential to improve global risk modelling and management systems.

The world currently lacks an authoritative and up-to-date assessment of climate change risks, say a group of experts writing in the journal Nature.

Flash droughts are severe droughts that rapidly intensify over weeks rather than seasons, desiccating land and ravaging livelihoods without warning. Such droughts are becoming a defining systemic risk.

A fascinating case study from the 24 June 2025 Granizal landslide in Medellín, Colombia, which killed 27 people and destroyed 50 homes, shows demonstrates that it is not just the urban poor that are exposed to landslides.

This paper explores the cross-sectoral cascading impacts of extreme weather events on Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) to evidence the interconnected vulnerabilities across energy, water, transport and telecommunications.

This article investigates the unprecedented fire disaster that destroyed over 16,000 structures and caused 31 fatalities. Urban firestorms are a growing hazard in fire-prone regions worldwide due to increasingly dry vegetation.

As world leaders gather in Brazil for COP30, climate resilience and adaptation are at the top of the news agenda. Built environment professionals have long been helping to shape the future of how we live in a changing world - no more so than in London.

This study systematically reviews 946 studies about Human Mobility under disasters, framing mobility as simultaneously responding to external shocks and transmitting impacts.

Policy teams in central government departments and specialized agencies now have access to STEER, a guided framework about systemic risks, spot gaps in current approaches, compare options, and design context-specific responses.

This article hopes to broaden the systemic risk literature, traditionally focused on finance, infrastructure, and food systems, towards a more integrated account that includes human health and wellbeing as central to resilience.

This study explores how Norwegian leaders in rural municipalities attend to disaster risk governance and prepare for resilient response to threats from systemic, interconnected, and cascading hazards.

A new paper by Northeastern University professor Samuel Munoz reports that the risk of shipping disruptions will grow in a warming climate unless steps are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to adapt to drier conditions.

Recent flooding in various Himalayan states have been widely attributed to cloudbursts, but experts say the label masks systemic failures.

In Limbe, Cameroon, flooding is not just caused by heavy rainfall. Rather from a complex interplay of land-use decisions, poor waste management, weak governance and a lack of infrastructure. Tackling this requires a systems‑thinking approach.

Flooding is a complex phenomenon, with a wide range of causes that go far beyond rising sea levels. In Europe alone, floods can stem from coastal storms, overflowing rivers, heavy snowmelt, or flash floods triggered by intense thunderstorms.

From city transit to cross-country freight, Australia’s rail system is straining as the infrastructure ages and climate extremes grow more intense and frequent. Much of Australia’s rail backbone was built decades ago.

This study combined hydroclimatic hazard impact and supply-driven input-output models to develop an integrated approach for estimating the cascading impacts on food, electricity, and water supplies associated with drought, flood, and heatwave hazards.

By assessing two recent global food and energy systemic crises, the authors propose a methodological framework applicable to assessing systemic risks in a polycrisis context, drawing from and building on existing approaches.

Forest fires are a difficult cycle to break: A tiny spark has the potential to transform into a raging fire, exacerbating climate change and making future fires more likely.

Solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience.

This review examines the concepts of polycrisis and systemic risks, highlighting their commonalities and differences, and discussing their implications for risk assessment, governance, and communication.

This paper highlights the escalating complexity of global risk in the context of a polycrisis—a convergence of interconnected crises that simultaneously unfold and amplify one another in unpredictable ways.

In these five-minute mini-games, players analyze and discuss factors influencing resource allocation in large-scale crises.