A new paper, ‘The urgency of building systemic risk capacity in a polycrisis world’, looks at why traditional approaches to risk management are falling short due to their lack of a systems approach. Published in the journal One Earth, the paper calls for a major reconfiguration across sectors and geographies to build the systemic risk capacity needed to address today’s unique and unprecedented polycrisis.
The authors argue that traditional, siloed risk management strategies are no longer sufficient because they fail to account for the systemic nature of risk, which is characterised by cascading effects, non-linear feedback loops, and extreme uncertainty. The paper emphasizes that current governance, research, and funding structures are too fragmented to handle these entanglements.
The paper calls for organizations and governments to develop a systemic risk capacity. This involves a major reconfiguration, moving away from ‘predict-then-act’ models toward adaptive, cross-sectoral frameworks.
The authors warn that without a fundamental shift toward systemic thinking, organizations and institutions will remain ill-equipped to prevent or mitigate the increasingly complex emergencies of the 21st century.
