The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI)
Social systems are both the channel through which other risks reach people and a source of risk in their own right. Health, food, water, housing, work, information and finance all pass through households and communities, and social conditions in turn shape how infrastructure, markets and institutions perform under stress. This page explains the causal, physical, economic, social and ecological links, and the way stress travels along them.
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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 population density and true-colour imagery, framed on Latin America and the Caribbean; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer 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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GeographyFor dependencies and consequences, in GCRI's spatial-intelligence reading, the map opens on population density and true-colour imagery, framed on Latin America and the Caribbean; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
Dependencies and consequences in Society and Human Development describe how society and human development as well as information and public trust connect to other systems through physical, economic, social and ecological links, and how stress travels along them toward fields such as those of Information Integrity and Public Trust and Institutional Funds Nexus. 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.
Service failures hit hardest where households cannot buy substitutes such as bottled water, generators or private care.
Food and fuel price shocks and job losses pass straight into household budgets, forcing trade-offs between essentials.
Whether people follow public health or evacuation advice depends on trust and on the information they receive.
Social conditions feed back into other systems. Coping strategies, such as selling productive assets, cutting meals or withdrawing children from school, protect households in the short term but reduce future capacity. Displacement concentrates demand for housing, water and services in receiving areas. Loss of trust in institutions reduces compliance with public measures and weakens collective action in the next crisis.
Inequality amplifies these feedbacks. Where protection is unevenly distributed, the same shock produces larger aggregate losses and slower recovery. Social unrest can follow when hardship is perceived as unfair. Ecological links run both ways: degraded environments reduce livelihoods for people who depend directly on natural resources, and poverty can force practices that degrade them further.
Time matters in every link. Some effects are immediate, such as loss of income when a market closes; others accumulate over years, such as the health and earnings consequences of interrupted schooling or chronic food insecurity. Analysis therefore distinguishes short-run shocks from long-run erosion of capabilities.
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. |
Dependency analysis combines household survey data, spatial analysis of exposure and services, causal methods to separate effects from correlations, and qualitative work to understand mechanisms. Every dependency map states its assumptions, data and uncertainty; see methods and uncertainty. A dependency map describes how stress could travel; it is not a forecast.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.