These active working platforms span a wide range of topics that fall within the scope of RiskKAN’s work and contribute to the implementation of the objectives RiskKAN. Become a RiskKAN member and subscribe to the General Emailing lists!
Nature Based and Community Led Climate Risk Strategies
Nature-based and community-led solutions stand out as promising pathways for both disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. These approaches integrate ecological and social systems, drawing on local knowledge and natural processes to build resilience
A key rationale of this working group is to advance inter- and trans-disciplinary research on the effectiveness, scalability, and governance of these strategies. By integrating insights from different disciplines, the group aims to bridge knowledge gaps and support evidence-based decision-making for more resilient and adaptive communities.
Cities and Critical Infrastructure
Climate extremes, as well as natural and man-made hazards, often affect people directly, but sometimes exacerbate their impact by affecting urban environments and essential infrastructure services, including water, food, health, energy, information, security, and cultural identity.
Cities are melting pots of cultures and innovations, but also hotspots of disaster exposure and impact chains that connect cities to other urban and rural areas.
The topics of vulnerability research, as well as critical infrastructure, have driven the development of methodologies to identify and prioritise needs and capacities in dealing with risks, disasters, or transformations, including climate change-driven processes of adaptation and resilience.
AI for Complex Climate Risk Mitigation
Our mission is to advance the development and application of Artificial Intelligence as a transformative tool for understanding and mitigating complex weather- and climate-related risks across timescales, from immediate hazards to near-term projections and decadal to centennial foresight.
This working group builds on the recognition that AI holds unique potential to support the entire early warning chain, encompassing systemic forecast or prediction tasks beyond weather (i.e. hazards and impacts), as well as communication and early warning tasks and decision support applications.
Warnings and Preparedness for a Riskier World
As climate change, urbanization, land degradation, and systemic interdependencies intensify the frequency and complexity of disasters, there is a growing need to strengthen multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS), anticipatory action and preparedness strategies that enhance resilience across scales and different contextual settings. While early warning systems have advanced significantly for single hazards, they remain fragmented and insufficient in addressing compound, cascading, and interacting risks, leading to potential trade-offs in preparedness and response options.
This working group responds to the call to address that gap by providing a collaborative platform for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to co-develop novel insights and knowledge on risk-informed, people-centered MHEWS and preparedness approaches.
Climate Risk Modelling for the Financial Sector
Many challenges present themselves when modeling physical climate risks within the financial sector. Such challenges can be addressed though analysis and research on stress-test methodologies, credit risk modeling, the design of new and innovative insurance products, how to use and improve simulation models, and the definition of modeling frameworks to assess systemic risk in the context of the financial sector.
The working group’s main goal is to carry out and disseminate scientific research in the above mentioned areas.
Systemic Risk, Existential Risks, Polycrisis
Contemporary risks are increasingly complex and interdependent, reflecting a global reliance on tightly coupled socio-technical systems. Recent events illustrate how vulnerabilities in just-in-time supply chains and insufficient system resilience (e.g., lack of modularity and redundancy) can precipitate widespread disruptions. Notably, global impacts do not require large-scale shocks; disturbances within interconnected systems can escalate rapidly and cascade through systems, crossing sectoral and geographical boundaries.
Systemic risk assessment offers a critical framework for mapping these interdependencies, understanding their dynamics, identifying leverage points, and informing interventions that enhance resilience and reduce cascading failures. However, this raises pressing analytical, policy and governance questions. This working group seeks to advance systemic risk scholarship and practice.
Climate Change, Disasters, Health and Well-being
Climate change, urbanisation, land degradation, and systemic interdependencies are intensifying the frequency and complexity of disasters. When natural hazards and disease outbreaks co-occur, they create cascading effects that amplify health and well-being impacts. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how mobility restrictions and disrupted health systems complicated disaster response, while recent events such as floods in Pakistan demonstrated how hazards can directly trigger disease outbreaks.
The scientific and operational understanding of compound, cascading, and interacting risks at the intersection of climate change, disasters, and health remains fragmented. This working group responds to this need by providing a collaborative platform for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to co-develop knowledge and solutions.
Compound Events
Compound events often span multiple hazard types and locations and cause complex impacts to communities, ecosystems, and economies. It is therefore critical to connect scientific disciplines at an international level for furthering our collective understanding of these events.
The aim of the compound events working group is to create and sustain an international community with an interest in weather/climate compound events, including their characteristics, risks, and impacts. Our focus is mostly on the physical science of high-impact compound events, but we encourage contributions and insights from all fields.
Islands and Coasts
Information about this working group to come soon. Stay tuned!
Risks from Human Responses to Climate Change
Human responses to climate change are diverse and evolving. Our group seeks to clarify our understanding of how adaptation and mitigation responses affect specific climate change risks (reduce, avoid, displace or increase), how they affect other responses (eg. how adaptation and mitigation affect each other) or where they are making risks worse (eg. maladaptation or malmitigation, and more extreme responses such as Solar Radiation Management).
The initial focus of the group includes human mobility and immobility in the context of climate change, education, wellbeing and health. This working group draws on extreme and compound events to unpack the multifaceted ways in which people and nature are impacted by responses.
Propose a new working group!
RiskKAN welcomes contribution to and participation in further development of RiskKAN structure, Working Groups and others! Any RiskKAN member can propose a new working group at any time. The working group will be added after approval by the RiskKAN Steering Committee (SC). Working groups undertake supporting and associated research, networking and other activity. Activity will be reported to the RiskKAN SC and may assist the steer committee in future RiskKAN priorities.
If you are interested in opening up a new Working Group, get in touch with us to find out more.