Have your say on the DPMC’s Insights Briefing by 27 August
Background
New Zealand public sector agencies must prepare a ‘long-term insights briefing’ every three years. This is an opportunity to look beyond short-term political cycles and use foresight to see what really matters to New Zealand over the longer course.
In 2025 DPMC has collaborated with the National Hazards Board, and the Ministry for the Environment to produce a draft Briefing on “Building Resilience to Hazards“.
In the present global ecological and geopolitical context it seems nothing could be more important and the document is currently out for public consultation.
We have submitted feedback on this Briefing. The opening paragraphs of our submission read as follows:
Introduction
Islands for the Future of Humanity commend the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), National Hazards Board, and Ministry for the Environment for producing the Draft Long-Term Insights Briefing (LTIB) on Building New Zealand’s Long-Term Resilience to Hazards (2025). It is clear that considerable effort has gone into framing resilience as a long-term national priority, one that reaches beyond the short-term horizons of electoral cycles. The LTIB recognises that resilience is essential not only for hazard response but also for long-term wellbeing and prosperity. This acknowledgment is timely and welcome.
This submission offers constructive feedback aimed at strengthening the LTIB. Specifically, we argue for expanding the scope of hazards considered, embedding a systemic and evolutionary risk framework, ensuring that the focus of government is on safeguarding basic needs in all circumstances, and advancing institutional reforms that guarantee transparency, accountability, and informed consent. We also highlight the importance of reframing resilience as an opportunity for national growth, rather than primarily a narrative of risk and trade-offs.
By adopting these improvements, the LTIB has the potential to position New Zealand as a global leader in anticipatory governance of global risks and hazards.
You can read our full submission here (PDF, 12 pages).
Do you agree with us? Public consultation is open until 27 August, you can have your say by completing the simple online form found here.
Consider donating
If you support our project of providing non-partisan evidence-based information and options to support resilience to global catastrophic risks, then consider donating to help our charity Islands for the Future of Humanity.
Your support allows us to continue producing risk information and resilience options that could benefit New Zealand and the world.
Do these NZ government draft plans adequately address national resilience?
TLDR/Summary
The NZ Government is consulting on two major draft plans: the National Infrastructure Plan and the National Fuel Security Plan.
Our charity, Islands for the Future of Humanity, submitted responses to both, urging stronger planning for global catastrophic risks (GCRs) like nuclear war, extreme pandemics, or trade collapse.
We find both plans lack adequate preparation for long-term or extreme global disruptions or global critical infrastructure destruction.
Our recommendations include more focus on infrastructure essential for providing basic needs like water, food, transport and communications in the worst possible scenarios, such as trade isolation.
We also propose mandatory resilience assessments in all infrastructure investment decisions, explicitly addressing potential global catastrophes.
Submissions are open: help shape NZ’s future resilience before the deadlines—6 August (Infrastructure) and 25 August (Fuel Security).
Two critical government consultations
The New Zealand government has called for submissions on drafts of two major plans pertaining to national infrastructure and fuel security.
The NZ Infrastructure Commission and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have asked how we can future-proof the systems that keep our country running.
Our non-partisan independent charity Islands for the Future of Humanity has made submissions on both, advocating for a bold shift in how we think about resilience: not just to climate change or short-term shocks, but to global catastrophic risks (GCRs) that could fundamentally alter New Zealand’s operating environment.
We find that neither draft satisfactorily addresses global catastrophic risk. We need to ask more of our decisionmakers to ensure national resilience and future wellbeing.
Government plans need to ensure basic needs like food, water, transport and communications can be provided no matter what catastrophes befall the world.
The Draft National Fuel Security Plan, released by MBIE, proposes stockholding obligations, better data visibility, expanded fuel storage, and support for biofuels and EVs. The Plan builds on the 2025 Fuel Security Study, which modelled a severe 90-day disruption to fuel imports (and which we critiqued in a previous post finding the analysis wanting). While welcome progress, the draft plan stops short of addressing how New Zealand could survive a prolonged or permanent disruption to global fuel supply—such as from nuclear conflict, electromagnetic pulse, or widespread supply chain collapse. These are not science fiction; they’re now being actively studied by global agencies, including the US National Academies of Sciences and a new UN Scientific Panel on nuclear war impacts (see our previous post on these reports).
In our submission, we call for a fuel system that guarantees basic needs—food, water, critical transport—under even the worst scenarios. That means modelling fuel demand for essential services in year-long (or longer) disruptions, and developing domestic liquid fuel production capacity, especially regionally distributed biofuel refineries that can pivot between commercial and crisis modes. Electrification is essential, but we must also prepare for shocks that knock out the electric grid itself, as detailed in our recent webinar and expert panel discussion on catastrophic electricity loss.
Meanwhile, the Draft National Infrastructure Plan, published by the NZ Infrastructure Commission, takes a broad look at long-term investment challenges. It rightly addresses fiscal constraints, climate resilience, and aging infrastructure—but barely mentions the possibility of catastrophic global disruption, yet the risk of this is clearly rising, as we’ve discussed in a previous post. Our submission urges the Commission to embed systemic risk and GCR thinking into infrastructure planning, including:
Distributed and resilient energy and food systems,
Domestic cloud and communication infrastructure,
Transport redundancy across islands and to Australia, and
Pandemic-ready health facilities and critical supply sovereignty.
We also argue for mandatory resilience assessments in infrastructure funding decisions, contemplating catastrophic risk scenarios, and using long timeframes and appropriate discount rates that don’t marginalise future generations.
Both submissions draw on our wider work, including our NZCat Report, which maps how island nations like New Zealand are vulnerable to GCRs, but with foresight can play a vital global role in preserving human civilisation through catastrophe—if we plan accordingly.
Let’s make sure resilience means more than recovery after the fact, or merely protecting business as usual. It must mean anticipatory governance and preparedness for whatever comes.
Support our work
If you support this kind of thinking and work, then help us free up time to do more. Please consider donating via our NZ registered charity’s givealittle page.
I attended the 2025 European Urban Resilience Forum in Rotterdam and learned the following:
There is a resilience blind spot: European cities excel at climate adaptation but miss the bigger picture—climate change is just one of 14 global systemic stresses that could cascade into catastrophic failures.
Cities like Rotterdam have made advances: Treating cities like accident patients, monitoring vital systems (electricity, water, transport, communications) through cross-sector teams that meet fortnightly, building relationships and understanding system interdependencies.
War is a resilience killer: Geopolitical conflicts from Ukraine to India-Pakistan tensions are overwhelming political bandwidth needed for long-term resilience planning, diverting resources from preparation to immediate survival.
New Zealand’s unique challenge: Our geographic isolation could be either shield or vulnerability—New Zealand needs resilience systems that preserve urban functions when global supply chains collapse, not just protection from local weather events.
We must move beyond simple climate thinking: Nuclear conflict, extreme pandemics, and system-wide failures don’t respect borders—urban resilience must address the full spectrum of global catastrophic risk.
The bottom line: New Zealand must ensure cities can maintain basic human needs (water, food, energy, communications) post-catastrophe, turning our remoteness into strength rather than weakness.
A Judging Panel at the Forum concurred that pilot projects are over—we need systematic approaches that seek to change the mechanics of cities.
Action needs to include cooperation among organisations. At home this might mean NEMA working seriously with the Infrastructure Commission, overseen by Chief Risk or Resilience Officers to build resilient solutions ahead of time.
Graphical recordings of the European Resilience Forum 2025 sessions can be accessed here.
Introduction
I attended the European Urban Resilience Forum (Rotterdam, June 25-27), which brought together city leaders, policy makers, and resilience practitioners grappling with an uncomfortable reality: traditional approaches to climate adaptation may no longer be sufficient in an era of converging and interacting global risks.
Rotterdam’s vice-mayor discussed life six metres below sea level, while Greek innovation seeks to detect wildfires using AI-enabled drones, and Ukrainian municipal officials are balancing climate action against the immediate demands and effects of war. Discussions at the Forum revealed both the promise and limitations of current resilience thinking.
While many European cities are pioneering innovative climate adaptation approaches, there was also a critical blind spot that New Zealand, given its unique geography and vulnerabilities, cannot afford to ignore: the need to build resilience not just to local climate impacts, but to the full spectrum of global catastrophic and systemic risk and the various cascading and interacting effects that could reshape our world.
The State of Play: Europe’s Resilience Foundations
The Forum’s opening session, featuring a video message from Kamal Kishore of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, established the context that while disaster-related deaths have declined decade on decade, exposure to droughts and seismic risks continues to rise across Europe’s increasingly urbanised landscape. The message was clear, cities house 70% of Europe’s population and face disproportionate climate impacts, but this concentration also presents an opportunity for disproportionate positive impact through targeted urban resilience investments.
Rotterdam’s vice-mayor delivered practical wisdom: we need to make cities green. At six meters below sea level, Rotterdam has learned that green infrastructure—water buffers, reduced concrete, car-free spaces—isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about heat stress relief, flood management, and public health.
The city’s Roofscape Rotterdam tool allows users to map how 18 square kilometres of roof space could contribute to energy, water management, and other resilience goals, exemplifying the kind of bold and systematic thinking needed.
Our own food system research has recently argued for discussions about land use policy in the context of urban and near urban agriculture for resilience. Similar interactive tools could encourage the public to explore and debate optimal land use policy in New Zealand to balance resilience and development.
A recurring theme at the Forum was multilevel governance with risk ownership at every scale, supported by central government. European officials consistently emphasised the need to move beyond viewing resilience as a cost, instead acknowledging it as essential infrastructure investment that protects people, economies, and existing assets, with figures suggesting every dollar spent on resilience prevents ten dollars in future harm.
Although collaboration was spoken of across many contexts, the most innovative and actioned insights came from Rotterdam’s Maarten Nypels who oversees the Vital Urban Systems programme. Maarten articulated both the theoretical and practical dimensions of addressing our current predicament. He observed that “most crises are manmade”, a point that aligns with metacrisis thinking I’ve outlined in my recent blogs. He noted that humanity needs to understand how we created global and systemic vulnerabilities before we can address them effectively. This was a perspective missing from many reactive resilience solutions.
One of Maarten’s practical solutions is transformative: treat a city like an accident patient whose vital signs need constant monitoring. Rotterdam’s Vital Systems resilience program brings together experts responsible for electricity, water, transport, communications, and data systems in iterative fashion. Meeting fortnightly for three hours, these professionals developed deep understanding of system interdependencies and potential cascading failures, understanding each other’s systems. More importantly, they built the relationships and communication channels that enable rapid coordinated response when crises hit.
This model addresses a fundamental challenge in resilience building: breaking down silos and addressing resilience with cross-cutting approaches, agnostic to the specific hazards, whether climate change or otherwise.
Lessons about the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts presented by Cedric Grant reinforced this. As a Director of recovery, he provided key learnings such as New Orleans developing five microgrid electrical systems to prevent future total power loss, and collaborating with global experts from the Netherlands on flood protection, but also the learning that childcare availability determines whether people can report to work during recovery. The social infrastructure proved as critical as the physical.
The Blind Spot: Systemic risk and polycrisis
The Forum included a session on the current global polycrisis, in which panellists acknowledged the need for holistic approaches, but the discussion fell short of addressing the full spectrum of systemic and global catastrophic risk.
Climate change dominated discussions, despite being just one of 14 global systemic stresses. The holistic agenda needs to encompass disaster risk reduction, systemic risk (system-wide failures), polycrisis (interacting and cascading risks), the underlying stresses generating these risks, and the underlying drivers of humanity’s current predicament. These drivers include human behaviour, and evolutionary and game-theoretic processes subsumed under the moniker of ‘metacrisis’, just as Maarten alluded.
Visual summary of the session on polycrisis and urban resilience. Image credit: carlottacat.com
The narrow focus on climate mitigation and adaptation becomes particularly problematic when considering New Zealand’s unique position. A recent Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) paper highlighted the crucial intersection between global systemic risk and global catastrophic risk. Nuclear war, extreme pandemics, and supervolcano eruptions don’t just interact with existing vulnerabilities—their effects can amplify through global systems to produce catastrophic outcomes. These systems include many that are not traditionally considered in climate change mitigation and adaptation thinking.
For New Zealand, this intersection is critical. Our geographic isolation, which provides some protection from certain risks (eg pandemics), also creates unique vulnerabilities.
At the Forum, war emerged repeatedly as a barrier to resilience building, not just in Ukraine, but as a persistent drain on political attention and resources. Politicians are overwhelmed by war considerations across multiple theatres. This must be curtailed if humanity is to ensure resilience to the systemic and catastrophic risk we have created. War is accelerating humanity’s race to the bottom.
Lessons for New Zealand Urban Resilience Policy
New Zealand needs to consider the full and real consequences of escalating global war, potential global systemic failures, and the other varied hazards, vulnerabilities, amplifying and latent factors that contribute to global catastrophic risk, especially from the perspective of a remote island nation.
As well as asking how our cities can resist the effects of flooding, cyclones, and heat, while reducing emissions, we also need to be investing in ways to prevent disruption due to lack of industrial inputs like fuel, fertiliser and imported spare parts. We should design our vital systems to be self-contained, diverse, and resilient. We need to anticipate the demands of communications in the event of catastrophic internet failure, how to transport and process food with limited liquid fuel, and how to mitigate harmful mis- and dis-information, and a host of other system wide risks.
New Zealand’s resilience planning must extend beyond climate adaptation and economic resilience to address global catastrophic risks. This means ensuring that vital urban systems—electricity, energy, food supply, transport of critical goods—can operate at minimum levels post-catastrophe. It’s more than planting trees or providing heat shelters; it’s about maintaining basic human needs (like water, food, shelter, energy, transport, communications) when global systems fail. Action such as that which Rotterdam is taking, described by Maarten Nypels, was one of the few examples of genuine resilience building across risks that I heard at the Forum.
New Zealand’s new Space Weather plan, developed by NEMA, exemplifies this challenge. The plan focuses on response but it needs integration with the likes of the Infrastructure Commission’s long-term infrastructure plan to ensure that we’re not stuck in cycles of response and recovery, but rather we build out resilient solutions ahead of time. In London response and recovery teams are now co-located with resilience and prevention teams. NEMA must work with the Infrastructure Commission, and consider systemic risk beyond climate adaptation.
To achieve this upstream investment, finance sessions at the Forum emphasised that investors need detailed plans and predictable contexts. Cities will only be resilient if they’re resilient to the spectrum of Anthropocene risk. For New Zealand, this means building resilience systems that work whether the challenge is climate change, pandemics, or potential Northern Hemisphere nuclear conflict. It means ensuring our remote location becomes a strength rather than a vulnerability.
The conference’s emphasis on Chief Resilience Officers and acceleration of implementation has particular relevance for New Zealand and resonates with much of our previous work, such as our call for a Parliamentary Commissioner for Extreme Risks. Our cities need systematic approaches to resilience that acknowledge our unique vulnerabilities while learning from innovations in Europe and elsewhere.
Judges dispensing sustainability awards at the Forum were clear, that the time of pilot projects is over. Winning entries were visionary, and aimed at changing the mechanics of cities fundamentally.
Conclusions
Much was said and shared at the European Urban Resilience Forum, and I have necessarily focused on just a few themes, namely the need to incorporate an understanding of global systemic and global catastrophic risk in urban resilience programmes.
The Forum demonstrated that the solutions exist, but we need the political will to implement them at scale. For New Zealand, the imperative is clear: we must build resilience systems that address not just the climate crisis, but the full spectrum of global catastrophic risks that could affect our remote island nation.
Perhaps most striking for New Zealand observers is how geopolitical instability emerged as a defining constraint on resilience planning. Ukrainian representatives highlighted the cruel paradox of needing to build climate resilience while resources are diverted to immediate survival. This reality check extends beyond Ukraine—panellists repeatedly noted how global conflicts from Israel and Gaza to Iran to India-Pakistan tensions are overwhelming political bandwidth needed for long-term resilience planning.
For New Zealand, this raises fundamental questions about how our geographic remoteness might be both shield and vulnerability in an era where Northern Hemisphere conflicts, extreme pandemics, or other global catastrophic risks could profoundly impact our resilience assumptions and supply chains. A new wave of resilience action needs to address global systemic and catastrophic risk.
A Tale of Two Conferences Part II: ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium 2025
(In-depth read, 15 min)
The importance of nature was clear at Les Fontaines – venue for the ASRA Symposium. Photo credit: the author
TLDR/Summary
Part II of a two-part blog series reporting on a pair of crisis/disaster risk conferences – this one covers the ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium, which offered a refreshing contrast to the UN’s symptom-focused approach detailed in Part I.
ASRA brought systems thinking to crisis management – 250 multidisciplinary experts tackled interconnected “polycrisis” issues rather than isolated disasters, focusing on the deeper stresses that drive cascading failures.
Keynote speakers delivered transformation-focused messages – Poet Ben Okri challenged humanity to become “the people our times require,” while Christiana Figueres emphasised that “linear thinking has no place” in addressing systemic risk.
Practical tools emerged alongside theory – ASRA launched STEER, a beta tool for systemic risk assessment, and workshops demonstrated hands-on polycrisis analysis and intervention design using real global stresses and future scenarios.
The hard truth: single solutions won’t work – Whether it’s capitalism, carbon emissions, or specific leaders, there’s no single root cause to our interconnected crises; siloed institutions impede the interdisciplinary approaches we desperately need.
Bottom line: humanity has the frameworks and community, but the race against time continues – ASRA provided genuine hope and practical starting points, but whether this scales fast enough to prevent humanity’s “hard landing” remains the crucial question.
Definitions
Global systemic stresses: long-term processes that weaken the resilience of critical global systems by increasing pressures, sharpening contradictions, and expanding vulnerabilities. These stresses make systems more vulnerable to trigger events that push them into a crisis.
Polycrisis: The simultaneous occurrence of multiple, interconnected crises that exacerbate each other, creating a situation more severe than the sum of its parts. It’s not just a collection of unrelated crises, but rather a situation where different crises interact and amplify the negative impacts of each other.
Systemic risk: The potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems. Systemic risk implies the potential for system-level breakdown and cascading consequences across human and natural systems.
Metacrisis: In this blog ‘metacrisis’ refers to the collection of forces: evolutionary, social, technological, and game theoretic, that drive and give rise to global systemic stresses, and resulting crises, polycrisis, and systemic risk.
Introduction & Context
Twenty-four hours after leaving the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Platform in Geneva, somewhat pessimistic about humanity’s trajectory, I found myself at Les Fontaines in Chantilly Gouvieaux, France, for an entirely different kind of gathering.
The Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) was hosting the ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium – the first transdisciplinary global meeting dedicated to action on systemic risk.
The Symposium offered what the UNDRR Global Platform appeared to miss: clear-eyed analysis of the deeper and interconnected stresses driving cascading crises, coupled with actionable frameworks for addressing them.
ASRA represents a fresh approach to global catastrophic risk. As a network of 90 transdisciplinary experts, it brought together 250 systemic risk practitioners and stakeholders to tackle what ASRA defines as systemic risk: “the potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems.”
Unlike traditional disaster risk conferences focusing on specific hazards, ASRA addressed the underlying patterns generating cascading failures across interconnected systems. The goal: prevent, mitigate, adapt, and transform away from systemic risk before it overwhelms humanity’s response capacity.
Opening Address: Ben Okri’s Call for Transformation
Ben Okri delivers the opening address at ASRA’s Symposium. Photo credit: the author.
British/Nigerian poet and author Ben Okri gave the opening keynote, a moving, powerful account of humanity’s current predicament that immediately distinguished this gathering from conventional policy conferences. As a renowned novelist, Okri brought a different lens that cut through technocratic language to human realities.
“Many things have come into reality that cannot sustain themselves,” Okri observed – capturing what metacrisis theorist Daniel Schmachtenberger had described as humanity’s “self-terminating race” (see Part I).
But rather than dwelling in despair, Okri challenged humanity towards transformation thinking: “We must not make the mistake of thinking that the present will become the future.”
His diagnosis was unflinching. “Nations cannot talk of making themselves ‘great’ at the expense of making the rest of humanity small,” directly addressing the zero-sum thinking that underlies the competitive dynamics driving many global systemic stresses.
Most crucially: “We cannot combat the difficulty of our times as the people we used to be, we have to be fit and healthy, and we have to create wider and wider communities and alliances and we have to fight the evil of our times intelligently.”
This call for intelligent, collaborative action echoed throughout the Symposium’s technical sessions.
Keynote: Christiana Figueres on Transformative Change
The first keynote session saw Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris Agreement, demonstrate how systemic thinking translates into concrete action. Her presentation exemplified the Symposium’s approach of inclusive systematic analysis with practical optimism.
“In the face of systemic risk, linear thinking has no place today,” Figueres began, directly addressing the siloed thinking that limited many of the UNDRR discussions I had attended the previous week (see Part I).
We have the technology and understand interconnectedness, she continued, the question is implementation. Furthermore, rather than aiming to minimise our impact, we should actively seek to restore nature, shifting from ‘sustaining’ to ‘regenerating.’
Costa Rica provided her key example, where laws now facilitate payment for environmental services, resulting in increased forest cover from 29% to 55%. This demonstrates how changing incentive structures drives systemic change.
Figueres used the metaphor of a spider web for interactions in complex systems, explaining that we can’t control the web through top-down decrees, but we can observe “which threads are being pulled and how” and identify effects and leverage points where small changes create large systemic shifts.
Christiana Figueres speaking at the 2025 ASRA Symposium. Photo: the author.
Most importantly, Figueres identified a crucial constraint: “The scarcest resources at the moment are kindness and love.” She warned against letting news feeds crowd out genuine learning sources, including learning from the natural world. In a similar vein, I’ve previously blogged on Jaron Lanier’s calls for deleting all your social media ‘right now’, in my post on Covid, Trump, and algorithms.
Panel Discussions: Scale, Speed, and Systemic Solutions
ASRA Symposium panels tackled how we can meet the scale, scope and speed required for transformation. Unlike conferences focusing on incremental improvements, panellists grappled directly with the need to change human systems.
Participants spoke of bold actions, trust, and “crazy imagination.” One participant noted that, “change happens at the speed of trust,” and “we need to be good ancestors, that’s all.”
But the panellists also honestly assessed barriers, noting for example that Ministers of Finance lack technical understanding of systemic risk. We need bold moves in building systemic resilience so that human systems can handle the stress of the transformation that is required to reduce risk in the long term. However, the current efficiency vs resilience trade-off balance is wrong – we’ve built fragile systems optimised for short-term performance. We must stress-test our systems (whether financial, trade, food, or whatever vital system) and ask if the future we’re creating is resilient to the shocks that are increasingly likely. These stress tests require facilitated dialogue and knowledge sharing across the sectors and systems.
On the required foresight, participants emphasized anticipatory governance as key. Long-term efficiency comes through resilience, not optimisation, because iterated disasters and shocks will undermine efficient systems more over time than resilient systems.
Unfortunately, current crisis response follows whack-a-mole patterns addressing symptoms not causes. Humanity lacks the appropriate anticipatory governance, mechanisms to effect system redesign, and cross-border, regional and global coordination. In particular, we need to stop trying to solve global problems with national tools (as this will lead us into the game theoretic traps and harmful zero-sum dynamics).
“We shouldn’t fix the past, we need to build the future. It was these old systems that have led us here,” noted one panellist. Furthermore, we should act with “good enough information and fast enough action” rather than delays in search of perfect knowledge and optimal decisions.
The way the world seems stuck in rigid historical frames and decision processes, maladaptive in a present world of crisis and existential threats, reminds me of a scene in the film No Country for Old Men. Once he has outwitted the hero, villain Anton Chigurh observes:
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
The world and its legacy rule-based institutions appear to be in a similar bind. A new system of rules and processes is needed, or humanity will be brought “to this”.
Anton Chigurh, the villain in No Country for Old Men, challenges humanity to reflect on our systems and processes. Miramax Films (2007).
Launch of the STEER Tool: Practical Systemic Risk Assessment & Response
At the Symposium, ASRA launched STEER (Systemic Tool to Explore and Evaluate Risks), a tool designed to help users ‘steer’ away from systemic crisis and toward solutions.
Currently in beta, STEER will make systemic risk assessment accessible to organisations, governments, and researchers across all systems and sectors.
STEER represents practical systems thinking and helps users map interconnections (systemic risk assessment) and identify intervention points (systemic risk responses) for systemic impact, rather than analysing risks in isolation. A combination of drop down menus, tutorial material, and prompts for reflection and action guide users through the processes of systemic risk assessment and response.
STEER will be publicly launched later this year, but feedback from conference attendees (all experts on systemic risk) beta testing the platform was very positive.
The ASRA Symposium provided opportunities for attendees to engage in the kind of processes that STEER encourages, through various workshops and side-events. I managed to attend two of these.
Workshop 1: Understanding Systemic Risk as Polycrisis
I participated in a breakout session facilitated by the Cascade Institute. This provided a hands-on polycrisis analysis exercise. The workshop highlighted global stresses and groups plotted possible interactions among these along with the triggers that could tip such interactions into crises. This helps us understand why so much is going wrong at the same time.
The theoretical basis for the Cascade Institute’s approach is their stress-trigger-crisis model. The model shows that stresses push systems toward points where triggers might create disequilibrium (and likely associated harm in human and ecological systems). Even without triggers, inexorable stressors will push systems into potentially harmful new states (eg, as the left hand depression in the figure below becomes shallower). Averting crises requires acting on stresses of three types: pressures, contradictions, and vulnerabilities.
Figure credit: Cascade Institute’s ‘Stress-Trigger-Crisis’ model (2024)
The Institute previously identified 14 global systemic stresses which create cascading failure conditions for humanity, and which must be addressed to have hope of mitigating the present polycrisis (you can read more about these here):
Climate heating
Ecological degradation
Toxicity
Zoonotic disease transfer
Demographic divergence
Concentrated industrial food production
Changing energy supply
Financial interconnectedness
Economic headwinds
Economic inequality
Ideological fragmentation and polarization
Political-institutional decay
Great power hegemonic transition
Propagation of artificial intelligence
Working groups mapped interactions between three assigned stressors each, analysing how crises emerge when triggers act within these interactions. Each crisis can become a trigger within other patterns.
The messy but structured and necessary process to understand complex systemic risk. Photo credit: the author.
For example, my group was tasked with considering interactions among:
North-South demographic divergence
The concentrated nature of industrial food production
Rising economic inequality
Interactions between these factors could be stressed further by events such as a policy shift in migration settings, or synchronous heatwaves in critical food production regions, leading to a crisis of workforce availability and food production, resulting in famine or war, with these crises then being the triggers of other global crises in cascading fashion.
The exercise rapidly demonstrated how current conditions create multiple, interacting, cascading failures – a polycrisis rather than isolated events. And we only considered three of the 14 global stresses!
Crucially, we brainstormed interventions for crisis mitigation through anticipatory action, such as sensible migration policies, sustainability criteria on imports, more heterogeneous distributed food systems, with food system buffers, and policies that alleviate economic inequality to hedge against short-term price shocks.
Key insight: There’s no single root cause of a polycrisis. It is not simply capitalism, carbon emissions, or the actions of particular leaders, but everything in conjunction. Single-point solutions won’t work. Siloed institutions impede solutions, which require interdisciplinary complex systems thinking.
Workshop 2: Preparing for Catastrophic System Failure
Another workshop facilitated by David Korowicz addressed whether catastrophic system failure can be mitigated ahead of time. We contemplated a scenario where (for the purposes of the foresight exercise) a national Cabinet has knowledge that a catastrophe severely decreasing goods, services, and energy access will happen in either 1, 4, or 8 years. Our group was tasked with considering how we would act with such information under the 4-year time horizon.
Roughly the results of our deliberations can be summarised as follows:
Prevent panic while being clear resilience is a fundamental priority and the nation needs to start seriously working to mitigate likely effects of future crises.
Assess physical security and available resources, ensuring physical safety and liaising with trusted international partners.
Strengthen connections at all levels across government and society (families, communities, regions, international).
Analyse complex reactions to crisis – how will people and countries respond? Will there be national hoarding with export controls? Ensure appropriate engagement with behavioural scientists.
Map consequences for energy, transport, food, and communications systems.
Stocktake the minimum functions required to sustain society according to hierarchy of needs (water, food, shelter, energy, etc).
Develop mitigation options for each critical function in context of the catastrophe.
Ensure redundant structures for communications, food, shelter.
Strategic stockpiling while understanding supply constraints from other jurisdictions doing the same.
Roll out incentives for electrification, local biofuels, distributed food production, and other resilience measures.
Sequence and prioritise all interventions for maximum effectiveness.
Admittedly all the above were developed on the fly in half an hour, but the exercise raised two key questions for me.
First, this all sounded incredibly familiar, and is basically the content of our own organisation’s detailed report on New Zealand’s vulnerability and resilience options against the risk of Northern Hemisphere nuclear war.
Recent media reporting on our study can be found here. You can read the rich and detailed report here, which is effectively a maturity model for resilience to global catastrophic risks, including one-page ‘cheat sheets’ for each key sector and for global catastrophic risk management.
Second, why haven’t governments of the world conducted this kind of exercise, and developed and implemented exactly these plans and programmes, in conjunction with their citizens, given the perilous state of the world?
The workshop discussions also highlighted that this kind of resilience doesn’t depend on nationalistic self-sufficiency but on creating systems that are less susceptible to cascading collapses: locally resilient food and energy, regional governance, delinking from fragile global finance, mutual support networks. But also, and importantly, linkages with regional partners, collaborations of nations to ensure trade and supply through investment in strategic infrastructure and plans, and the avoidance of hoarding, which although seems rational for individual jurisdictions, could actually lower the global mean ability to ride out the crisis, creating overall more harm.
Addressing the Causes of Global Systemic Stresses themselves
The workshops demonstrated that there are positive steps humanity can take towards limiting future catastrophe harm, even harm stemming from system-wide failures. We can implement systems thinking, map systemic interactions, develop resilience through anticipatory governance, conduct preparedness exercises, and reduce the human and environmental impact, and therefore depth of the economic harm that global systemic risk threatens.
ASRA’s greatest contribution was acknowledging this challenge while providing concrete intervention tools. Much more work is needed, particularly to address what drives these global stresses, including rivalrous dynamics preventing coordination, exponential technological advancement creating risks faster than assessment is possible, and resource degradation amid coordination failures. The impact of global stress reduction through systems thinking and action may still not be enough, because civilisation’s underlying dynamics don’t support such action. We’re potentially stuck in evolutionarily stable strategies where aggressive, exploitative behaviours outcompete cooperative, long-term alternatives – even when cooperation ensures collective survival.
All that said, the frameworks discussed and exercised at the ASRA Symposium offer genuine starting points for a new cognitive frame and for systemic intervention.
Conclusion: Building on Systemic Foundations
The contrast between the UNDRR Global Platform and the ASRA Symposium was striking and illuminates the limitations of current disaster risk reduction efforts, which are probably largely driven by historic silos.
While UNDRR demonstrated genuine commitment to developing resilience, discussion remained trapped within frameworks addressing symptoms rather than systems. ASRA took a fundamentally different approach, placing difficult systemic questions at the analytic heart. The result was honest assessment combined with practical intervention tools.
Most importantly, ASRA provided a transformation-focused community of practice. The Symposium demonstrated that systemic risk assessment isn’t an abstract academic exercise. It’s an urgent practical necessity for decision-makers navigating interconnected worlds where risks cascade faster than traditional approaches can address. This practical necessity needs to be resourced. Analysts and decision-makers across all vital sectors and systems need time and space to cooperate, coordinate, and hash-out these problems around the same table.
The challenge of disaster risk reduction, building immunity to global catastrophic risks, and transforming human systems away from those that generate these risks remains enormous. Changing competitive dynamics and evolutionarily stable strategies requires changes from individual consciousness right up to global governance.
We can respond and recover from various crises, we can build resilience and mitigate the impact of future crises, we can reduce systemic risk through judicious systems transformation, we can mitigate the polycrisis by minimising the global systemic stresses, but only by intervening on the forces comprising the metacrisis can we prevent global stresses and crises being thrown up again and again, in increasingly severe form.
I reported Daniel Schmachtenberger’s views in Part I. He notes that the race dynamics of humanity are self-terminating. Individual improvement is insufficient – we need to bend the entire arc of human history. Ben Okri echoed this at ASRA: “We have to find better alternatives to the current direction of history.”
But frameworks, tools, and community emerging from initiatives like ASRA provide hopeful foundations and Ben Okri’s challenge echoes as warning and invitation. We cannot combat our times’ difficulties as the people we used to be, but we can choose to become the people our times require.
Whether this mindset and process scales and accelerates quickly enough to bend the arc of human history before the “hard landing” becomes inevitable remains the question.
Adapt Research Ltd 