Making Sense of Multiple Stressors, Coupled Hazards, and Systemic Risks: How can we advance inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to vulnerability with a translator model?

Hazard impacts in the Anthropocene increasingly spill over different spatio-temporal scales, societal sectors, and risk types (e.g., from natural drivers to technological failures). Recent research efforts point towards broadening the risk systems outlines to rise to this challenge. They also indicate a need for further depth, capturing the emergent aspects and managing the (information) complexity of the risk systems at hand. These two efforts have so far been achieved separately, and holistic approaches remain costly and rare. We thus present a review of systemic risks, multiple stressors, and coupled hazards, and a four-stage framework that responds to the identified challenges. The four stages include an initial co-design stage, followed by a quantitative spatio-temporal risk assessment. A bottom-up thematic analysis follows and an agent-based model wraps up the framework, connecting scales, social sectors, and mixing evidence. We implemented the framework to analyse COVID-19 in Brazil and our mixed top-down and bottom-up evidence markedly differentiates exposure and vulnerability across social classes. Since the framework’s publication, our work has adapted the framework to the climate domain, drawing from the lessons learned to overcome disciplinary siloing, taking cross-sectoral losses into account, and tracking feedback between environmental and social factors. We believe these innovations are key for promoting evidence-based and context-sensitive policies essential for fairer and more effective adaptation.