Multi-hazard interaction, cascading impacts and indicators

Extreme weather-driven hazards are among the most likely and costly global risks, with societal fragility confirmed repeatedly through recent events. Record-breaking events and sequences of interacting weather extremes are increasingly causing devastating impacts through severe storms, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and floods. Climate change is altering their dependencies and exacerbating their impacts. Our interconnected world means that these impacts are not confined to one environment, sector, or society, or to within nations. These events are complex, with cascading risks and compounding impacts crossing boundaries and escalating through natural and manmade system interdependencies, economies and social constructs. This complexity makes understanding the risks of – and, crucially, the solutions to – these ‘multi-hazard’ events an immense challenge. In this presentation, we take an interdisciplinary approach to disaster risk management that recognises that natural hazards and the impacts of climate change are as complex and interconnected as our environment, people, places and systems. In this presentation, we discuss the development of new multi-hazard and multi-risk approaches that consider and communicate complex hazard interactions, vulnerability, exposure, system capacity and cascading impacts. By incorporating multi-hazards and cascading risks, we advocate an increased adoption of systems thinking and approaches, the co-production of solutions, and the use of multi-indicators that consider combinations of events to help manage complex risks now and in the future.