Coping with Polycrisis and Systemic Risks: New Approaches to Assessment and Governance

The emphasis of integrated disaster and risk research has shifted from topical analysis, such as dealing with natural disasters, technological accidents or environmental crises, to a comprehensive analysis of interconnected and mutually interactive risk sources and crises. This interaction has often been framed in the language of “polycrisis” indicating the potentially amplifying and cascading effects of each crisis from one domain to the next. At the same time, the literature on systemic risk also includes the effects of multiple, interacting risks on the functionality and survivability of entire systems such as climate stability, cybersecurity or energy production. New approaches such as foresight, integrated risk assessment, and adaptive management , are developed and applied to cope with this new challenge.

The webinar will address this new perspective on crisis and risks. All but one of the contributors have been authors or editors of papers that were published in a recent special issue of the International Journal for Disaster Risk Sciences. The goal of the webinar is to share insights of poly crisis research and contribute to a joint understanding of polycrisis and systemic risk for risk assessment, risk and crisis governance and effective communication to different audiences.

Moderator: Ortwin Renn, Director of Systemic Risk Research, EXTRA

Participants:

• Thomas Reuter, EXTRA, Australia
• Pia-Johanna Schweiter, RIFS, Germany
• Huan Liu, South China University of Technology, China
• Guoyi Han, Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden
• Jonathan Donges, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany
• Reinhard Mechler, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria