From systemic risks to systemic resilience: A pathways approach for disaster and climate risk management in Malawi and South Africa

To comprehensively manage the impacts from hazards and disasters, a nuanced understanding of the systemic nature of risks is needed. The effects of natural hazards, climate change and other human-generated shocks transcend borders, sectors and systems, highlighting the interconnected nature of risks. The lack of resilience in one sector can propagate risks across multiple other sectors, and interventions in response can generate trade-offs and unintended negative consequences leading to maladaptation. This emphasises that not only do we need to analyse risk from a systemic perspective, we must also approach risk management and adaptation to consider interconnected positive and negative cascading effects. 

Despite recent progress in complex risk assessment, translating information into actionable inputs for risk management remains a challenge. These challenges are especially pressing in countries burdened by increasing exposure to natural hazards and extreme climate effects. To support addressing this challenge, we integrated a novel  systemic risk analysis method named Impact Webs (Sparkes et al., 2023) with a pathways approach, to co-create disaster and climate risk management pathways with stakeholders, using the Republics of Malawi and South Africa as case studies. 

Impact Webs are system-oriented conceptual risk models that identify interconnections between hazards, risks, impacts, interventions, drivers of risks and root causes, mapping their interaction  across different sectors and at various scales. We co-developed Impact Webs with stakeholders, building on them to identify lessons for risk management adopting a pathways approach. Pathways are a flexible planning approach that incorporates stakeholders’ perspectives into decision making, reducing path dependencies and managing trade-offs. Decisions are taken based on how future conditions unfold. Our pathways development was also driven by stakeholders’ inputs, first using Impact Webs to identify entry points for risk management options. Barriers to implementing options were then identified, as well as enabling conditions to overcome them. We then engaged with potential trade-offs and positive cascading effects, identifying pathways for Malawi and South Africa that could strengthen resilience across multiple sectors. We took a transformational pathways approach, developing pathways for wide-ranging system changes needed to reach high resilience futures. The work was done over four workshops with a range of expert stakeholders, and was complemented by desk study and interviews.

Reflecting on the approach, a challenge arose in sequence actions, i.e., justifying the selection of one risk management option before another. This was due to developing pathways at the national scale across many sectors, therefore they were not targeted towards a specific decision or group of decision-makers. Despite this, the integration of the Impact Webs and pathways provides a useful methodology to move from systemic risk analysis to systemic risk management. Collecting feedback from stakeholders during the workshops, the co-creation process, and engaging with the visual output of an Impact Web, helped them think about risks and risk management in an interconnected manner, by considering cascading effects and response risks of interventions. This can foster understanding among decision makers about the interdependencies between sectors, thus supporting disaster and climate risk management that strengthens system-wide resilience across multiple sectors.