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.

Meet the team!

Robert Sakic Trogrlic

Robert Sakic Trogrlic is a research scholar in the Systemic Risk and Resilience Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program. He leads a thematic research line on co-production, engagement, and experiential learning. His research interests include multi-hazards and their interactions within multi-risk frameworks, people-centered disaster risk reduction, knowledge co-production, and innovative approaches for integrating physical and social sciences in disaster and climate research, policy, and practice.
In addition, he leads the Danube Pilot within the MYRIAD-EU Project, which advances multi-risk-informed management across the EU, as well as IIASA’s involvement in the Pathways2Resilience (P2R) Project, helping European regions and communities build climate resilience. He also co-leads Work Package 2 in the REACH Project, focusing on building resilience to floods and heat within maternal and child health systems in Brazil and Zambia.

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Marleen de Ruiter

Marleen de Ruiter is an Assistant Professor at the department of Water and Climate Risk of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and she is co-chair of the RiskKAN network.
In her current research, she focuses on consecutive disasters, improving modelling capabilities of multi-hazard risk and assessing the impacts of adaptation measures on Disaster Risk Reduction. As a Veni Laureate from the Dutch Research Council’s Talent Scheme (NWO), she works on the global consecutive occurrence of consecutive disasters followed by water-borne disease outbreaks using a Dynamic Bayesian Network approach. In 2024, she was granted the EGU Natural Hazards Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist award.
She manages the EU H2020 project Myriad-EU on multi-hazard risk assessments and management, she was one of the initiators and the scientific officer of the EGU multi-hazard sub-division.

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Andrew Kruczkiewicz

Andrew Kruczkiewicz is a hydrometeorologist based in New York at Columbia University. At Columbia, Andrew is affiliated with the Climate School, National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. His work focuses on forecasting extreme events, climate risk assessment, and integration of climate data within policy and decision making. Andrew conducts research on extreme weather and climate events focusing on both individual hazards, such as cyclones, floods as well as compound events. Andrew is Principal Investigator of sponsored research from NASA, The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, World Bank, International Organization for Migration and UN OCHA. He is faculty lecturer in the Columbia Climate School’s Climate and Society graduate program and is Co-Director of the Climate School Network: Sustainable and Resilient Living in an Era of Increasing Disasters. Andrew is Science Adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center and is an adjunct researcher at the University of Twente in The Netherlands.

Working Group Updates

Upcoming events

Warnings for Mental Health During Climatic Extremes 🧠 ☁️

⏰ 29th October 15:00 – 17:00, both in person and online.

ℹ️ We will launch the world’s first mental health index by Rhiannon Hawkins, with panel discussants including Prof Virginia Murray, followed by a Q&A.

🔗 Click here for more details and to register!

Building Effective Health Warnings for Users: The First Mile’ with Medici con l’Africa Cuamm/ Doctors with Africa CUAMM 🦠💉

⏰ 30 Oct 2025, 14:00–18:00, UCL Campus, in-person only

ℹ️ We will discuss with a wide range of stakeholders on how to build effective warnings for health issues, with a focus on emergent infectious diseases (EID) via a workshop with simulations, a roundtable event, and networking opportunities.

🔗 Click here for more details and to register!

Click here to check for future events of this working group!

Recent webinars

RiskKAN “Warning and Preparedness for a Riskier World” Webinar

Date: 17 September 2025

As societies face increasingly complex and compounding risks, food systems around the world are becoming more vulnerable. This webinar shared key insights from the Citi Foundation-funded project “Early Warning, Early Action for Cascading Risks to Food Security (EWAC)”, led by Chatham House in collaboration with Practical Action.

Click here to check out all our webinars on our YouTube channel!

Relevant recent publications