A Systemic Risk Approach for Integrated Disaster Response

As the environment and the economy undergo rapid, multidimensional change, disruptive events are becoming more frequent, unexpected, and difficult to plan for. They are often generated by systemic risks with complex, unpredictable, ambiguous, and globalized repercussions, such as pandemics, cyberattacks, climate change, food security, and war, among others. These Systemic risks exceed conventional methods of risk management; therefore they provide unresolved policy and governance issues. The COVID-19 pandemic is one such example, and it has heightened alarm as well as interest in the diversity of such future risks and the complexity of the disruption and impact they may produce. Due to the complexity and mutability of systemic risks, we need a paradigm shift in how we promote the deeper integration of catastrophe risk management across many sectors and levels, taking interdependence, co-benefits, and trade-offs into consideration. Using Covid19 as a case study, this chapter provides an overview of systemic risks, identify key inflection points in its evolution and proposed the basic design principles and conceptual framework for enhancing the overall management of systemic risks from a “Whole Systems Approach.”