The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Hazards cause harm through what they touch. A single storm can damage homes, cut power, close ports, contaminate water and interrupt supply chains, and each of those effects travels onward. This page sets out how physical hazards connect to infrastructure, economies, societies and ecosystems, how one hazard can set up or trigger another, and how Climate and Hazards analyses those links. A dependency map describes connections; it is not a forecast.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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For dependencies and consequences, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on daytime surface heat, rain, flood water and true-colour imagery, framed on World; 2 further NASA layers wait in the list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
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Dependencies and consequences in Climate and Hazards describe how climate and hazards as well as disaster and crisis connect to other systems through physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them toward fields such as those of Diplomacy Nexus and Climate and Nature Governance. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; it describes connections, not a forecast.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
| Sequence | Mechanism | Example of consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Drought then heavy rain | Dry, hard or burned soils absorb less water | Flash flooding and debris flows |
| Wildfire then storm | Loss of vegetation destabilizes slopes | Landslides and sediment in water supplies |
| Earthquake then rain | Shaking loosens slopes | Landslides for months or years afterwards |
| Storm surge with river flood | Coastal water level blocks river drainage | Deeper and longer flooding in estuaries |
| Heat with low river flow | Warm, low water limits cooling and hydropower | Reduced power supply during peak demand |
Damage to power, water, transport and telecommunications that spreads outage far beyond the hazard footprint.
Interrupted production and trade, insured and uninsured losses, and pressure on public budgets.
Injury, displacement, disease and lost livelihoods, and damage to ecosystems that themselves buffer hazards.
Within GCRI, Critical Infrastructure studies lifeline failures, Health Nexus the health effects and Disaster Resilience and Recovery preparedness and recovery. At The Global Risks Alliance (GRA), Reinsurance and Catastrophe and Disaster Risk Finance study how losses reach insurers and public finances. At The Global Risks Forum (GRF), Disaster and Crisis Governance covers who decides in a crisis.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interdependency | A two-way dependency between infrastructures, such as power needing telecoms for control while telecoms need power to run. |
| Cascading risk | Risk that a failure in one system or component triggers failures in others that depend on it. |
| Compound event | Two or more hazards or drivers occurring together or in sequence whose joint impact exceeds what either would cause alone, such as drought followed by intense rain; IPCC assessments use the term. |
| Dependency mapping | Tracing the people, processes, technology, facilities and suppliers a service relies on. |
Analysis combines spatial statistics to overlay hazard footprints on exposure, extreme value theory and multivariate statistics for joint occurrence, and high-performance computing for large simulated event sets. Each map states its data, assumptions and uncertainty; see methods and uncertainty and the topic on compound hazards. Back to the field overview.
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