Systemic risks emerging from compound vulnerabilities

This contributing paper analyses systemic risk and compound vulnerabilities, by highlighting a case study to help decision-makers formulate effective strategies to address the nature of systemic risks in their societies. The researchers put a spotlight on several risks and propose actions and policy recommendations. These spotlights include i) extreme weather events and internal displacement, ii) conflict and iii) food security.

Overall, this report presents a case for climate hazards as the exogenous starting point, as well as crop losses and high food prices as intermediary variables that impact food security. A common theme of each of the spotlight areas is that close attention needs to be paid to compound vulnerabilities such as regional manifestations of armed conflict and (mal)adaptive forms of human mobility to conflict hotspots to understand systematic risk from a changing climate perspective for food security. As the era of hazard-by-hazard risk reduction comes to an end, there is a need to better understand the systemic nature of risk.