Earth

Geographer presents new risk model that offers a more nuanced view of complex crises

Stages of the multiple stressor framework. Credit: One Earth (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2024.09.006

We live in a time of multiple crises: climate disasters, pandemics, species extinctions, and violent conflicts. Researchers and policymakers around the world are searching for ways to appropriately respond to this multi-headed monster. Easier said than done.

“Systemic risks are increasingly concentrated in the Anthropocene, the era of human influence,” says Dr. Alexandre Pereira Santos, head of the Human-Environment Relations Research and Education Unit in the Department of Geography at LMU. “We know that these risks cause damage and loss, but when the hazards interact and their effects are amplified, the losses can be even greater.”

This was the case, for example, when the COVID-19 crisis not only affected people’s health but also pushed many into poverty. However, in many crises, the complexity of interactions is only partially understood. Science struggles to integrate different scales of analysis, disciplinary perspectives, and social disciplines.

In a paper recently published in the journal One Earth, Pereira Santos and colleagues from the University of Hamburg and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology introduce a new approach to dealing with this complexity. Their goal was to consider different aspects and integrate them.

“Our novel concept uses well-known analytical methods from climate and social sciences and connects them through a translator,” says Pereira Santos. This translator brings together different perspectives, spatial and temporal scales, and social fields to provide a more nuanced representation of the health and climate crisis. Furthermore, we do this in a way that maintains the complexity and diversity of evidence to support more comprehensive and context-aware adaptation policies.

“Before our approach, researchers often had to choose which aspects to consider to avoid information overload. “We had to perform a finite analysis, and as a result, information was being lost,” explains the geographer. These losses include interactions between risks, individuals’ social situations, economic impacts, and risk exposures of different groups of people.

The authors point out that risk research is often limited by disciplined approaches and single-sector or scale analysis, leading to policy advice that is biased towards biased, misguided and unfair outcomes. They propose moving beyond such trade-offs in favor of addressing the complexity of different risks in a systematic manner without losing breadth and depth of analysis.

“Our translator model brings together disparate sources of evidence and combines them into a meaningful whole,” Pereira Santos summarizes. “The framework we propose provides a deep and broad (i.e. integrated and diverse) account of risk factors and supports research and policymaking with systematic and contextual evidence.”

Further information: Alexandre Pereira Santos et al. “Integrating the breadth and depth of multiple stressor research: A framework for translation across scales and disciplines,” One Earth (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2024.09.006

Provided by Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich

Citation: Geographers present new risk model that offers a more nuanced view of complex crises (October 23, 2024), https://phys.org/news/2024-10-geographers-nuanced-view Retrieved October 23, 2024 from -complex-crises. html

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