Emergency Risks Management

The risks that will shape the coming decade are increasingly systemic, interconnected and hard to anticipate. Climate shocks cascade into energy, food and health crises. New technologies create new dependencies and new points of failure.

Geopolitical instability strains supply chains, energy markets and public services at the same time. The danger is rarely a single event in isolation; it is the way one disturbance triggers others across systems that were never designed to fail together, producing impacts far larger than any single cause would suggest.

SoReCC studies how to look ahead, map these emerging and cascading risks, and build the capacity to manage them before they crystallise into crises.

Most institutions are organised to manage familiar risks within their own boundaries: a utility plans for outages, a hospital for surges, a ministry for its own remit. Emerging risk is precisely what falls between those boundaries. It is slow-building, cross-sectoral and easy to discount until it arrives, and it rarely respects the organisational lines drawn to contain it.

We approach this with a systems mindset, looking for the connections, dependencies and feedback loops that conventional, siloed analysis tends to miss. We treat foresight not as an attempt to predict the future precisely, which is impossible, but as preparation for a range of plausible futures, so that institutions are ready for what is possible rather than only for what is expected.

Our work combines structured foresight with the analysis of how risks interact and compound. Bringing engineering, economic and social perspectives into a single frame, we examine not only individual threats but the architecture of dependence that turns a local failure into a systemic one. This focuses on:

• horizon scanning and foresight to identify risks early, while there is still room to act rather than only to react
• cascading and compound risk, where a single trigger sets off failures across multiple sectors at once
• the dependencies between infrastructure, supply chains, digital systems and public services that few actors see in full
• risk governance, early warning and cross-sector coordination that allow a coherent rather than fragmented response
• the shared situational awareness that lets diverse actors prepare together instead of each in isolation

The aim is not to forecast a single future but to widen the range of futures an institution is ready for, and to shorten the time between a warning and an effective response. Often the knowledge needed to avert a crisis already exists somewhere in the system; what is missing is the means to connect it, interpret it and act on it in time.

Resilience to emerging risk depends less on predicting the next specific shock than on building the general capacity to absorb surprise. We study the characteristics that make systems robust under conditions no one foresaw: redundancy where it matters, flexibility to reconfigure under pressure, clear lines of decision when normal routines break down, and the institutional memory to learn from each event rather than repeat it. These qualities cannot be bolted on during a crisis; they have to be cultivated in advance, and they are as much about culture and governance as about technology.

This work speaks to Europe's growing focus on disaster resilience and on systemic and cross-border risk, where the cost of being unprepared is measured not only in financial losses but in lives, livelihoods and public trust. Recent years have shown how quickly a shock in one domain can spread to others, and how unprepared tightly coupled systems can be when it does.

It contributes to Sustainable Development Goals 11, 13 and 9: resilient communities, climate action, and resilient infrastructure capable of withstanding shocks that arrive from unexpected directions.

Preparedness depends on seeing the connections that others overlook. SoReCC works to turn fragmented risk knowledge into shared understanding and coordinated readiness, so that institutions meet the coming decade with foresight rather than hindsight, and with plans rather than improvisation.