Promoting disaster preparedness and resilience by co‐developing stakeholder support tools for managing the systemic risk of compounding disasters (PARATUS)

Such events as Hurricane Katrina, Pakistan Earthquake, disaster floods in Europe, Turkey earthquake in 1999, Turkey and Syria earthquake in 2023, triggered cascading failures in infrastructure, energy, water, food, services, and social systems. The American Society of Civil Engineers called the flooding triggered by hurricane Katrina “the worst engineering catastrophe in US History.”

These events attract and require systemic analysis by various stakeholders and disaster- and risk-management communities, to address the question: How a single event—a hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, blizzard, industrial or transportation accident—can induce cascading multiple failures that substantially magnify consequences. Analyzing the reasons of the systemic risks and impact chains after they occur is essential from multiple points of view, e.g., socio-economic, technological, environmental, but is not sufficient for decreasing exposure and vulnerabilities, i.e., for reducing tragic consequences to people, economies, and the environment if similar events happen in the future.

Systemic risks challenge traditional risk assessment and management approaches. Systemic cascading risks management addresses risks generated in interdependent systems by a combination of exogenous shocks and incoherent decisions of intelligent agents. The magnitude of cascading damages is defined by the ability of the interdependent (water, sewer, energy, infrastructure, food, etc.) systems to withstand the events. This urges not to wait and see for cascading events and damages to happen, but to investigate if the resilience of the systems is up to data or how to improve the capacity of the systems to withstand the catastrophes with possible cascading failures.

Stakeholders and experts in disaster risk management are faced with the challenge to adapt their risk reduction policies and emergency plans but lack the tools to account for the cross-sectoral impacts and dynamic nature of the risks involved. They need to be able to track the systemic dependencies to model cascading event progression and prevent the events or build in resilience. This modelling includes the linkages between the relevant systems: infrastructure, land use, energy, water, services systems, economic effects, including direct impacts on the surrounding area as well as indirect ones that can occur thousands of miles away as demand and consumption change. The cascading events can become more frequent especially in the context of the climate challenge if exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of the interdependent systems does not adjust and improve according to the changing environment.

The CAT (Cooperation and Transformative Governance) group of the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) program at IIASA is a part of a large international consortium of research organizations, NGOs, SMEs, first and second responders, and local and regional authorities (insert link) contributing to the PARATUS project. The aim of the PARATUS is to gain a deeper understanding of multi-hazard cascading systemic risks and impact chains. PARATUS develops new exposure and vulnerability analysis and scenario development methods that enable systemic risk assessment across sectors (e.g. humanitarian, transportation, communication) and geographic settings (e.g. islands, mountains, megacities).

Grounding on the IIASA rich and unique methodological and practical experience in advanced systems analysis, the CAT group contributes to the PARATUS project by developing methodologies and decision support tools for a systemic multi-sectoral and multi-hazard risk assessment and their application to the four case studies using experience of the PARATUS consortium and the available information from earlier European projects and Copernicus services.

In particular, CAT group is involved in the co-development of scenarios for future changes including climate change effects for multi-hazard risk assessment and potential changes of exposure, vulnerability and resilience for the four application sites. Three broad classes of development scenarios, which define future exposure and vulnerability, have been discussed and formulated with case study members:

Business-as usual (do nothing) – Scenario envisages proportional developments and growth (decline) of elements at risk (buildings, population, sectors, etc.);

Exploratory – One-by-one scenarios can explore multiple alternative storylines, possible configurations of ICs., combinations of ex-ante and ex-post measures, etc. This scenario can result in an extreme number of alternatives and ICs, which can lead to high risk of missing the most necessary IC and necessary measures;

Robust - Robust scenarios aim for the most desired ones by introducing buildings retrofitting, improving building codes, zoning, according to specific norms, e.g., urban planning, accounting for underlying uncertainties, avoiding risks, at various levels.

The scenarios can be regarded as representations of future development alternatives that are conceptualized to test the efficiency of related ex-ante and ex-post decisions and policies to mitigate and adapt to various types of risks at required levels, e.g., at the level of a city, city district, a region(s), a network of interdependent systems, exposed to specific trigger events/natural hazards. In the PARATUS project, CAT group will develop and apply proper procedures and models for risk-adjusted downscaling, optimization, discounting, robust machine learning, models’ linkage, and other methodologies and tools required for designing the future risk-adjusted exposure and vulnerability scenarios for case studies. These methods will be used to analyze plausible risk changes across space and time and, together with relevant stakeholders and experts, to develop new scenarios and risk mitigation options decreasing systemic damages.

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