Human societies and ecological systems face increasingly severe risks, stemming from crossing planetary boundaries, worsening inequality, rising geo-political tensions, and new technologies. In an interconnected world, these risks can exacerbate each-other, creating systemic risks, which must be thoroughly assessed and responded to. Recent years have seen the emergence of analytical frameworks designed specifically for, or applicable to, systemic risk assessment, adding to the multitude of tools and models for analysing and simulating different systems. By assessing two recent global food and energy systemic crises, we propose a methodological framework applicable to assessing systemic risks in a polycrisis context, drawing from and building on existing approaches. Our framework’s polycrisis-specific features include: exploring system architectures including their objectives and political economy; consideration of transformational responses away from risks; and cross-cutting practices including consideration of non-human life, trans-disciplinarity, and diversity, transparency and communication of uncertainty around data, evidence and methods. This paper proposes a framework to assess systemic risks that compound and cascade within and between systems. This emphasizes political economy and transformations, as well as trans-disciplinarity and diverse participation, evidence and methods.
A systemic risk assessment methodological framework for the global polycrisis
A. Gambhir,Michael J. Albert,Sylvanus S P Doe,J. Donges,N. Farajalla,L. Giatti,H. Gundimeda,Sarah Hendel-Blackford,Thomas Homer-Dixon,Daniel Hoyer,Sumaya Adan,David Jacome-Polit,Luke Kemp,David Korowicz,Z. Kovacic,Jan H. Kwakkel,Laurie Laybourn,Robert Lempert,Ayan Mahamoud,T. Oliver,Ivana E Pavkova,Joseph Ponnoly,Vishwas Satgar,Megan L. Shipman,J. Sillmann,N. Silver,Samuel Stevenson,Ruth Richardson
Published 2025 in Nature Communications
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- Publication year
2025
- Venue
Nature Communications
- Publication date
2025-08-14
- Fields of study
Sociology, Medicine, Environmental Science
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Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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