Breaking the Silos – Towards multi-hazard, multi-sectoral approaches to managing risks

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Join the session to learn more about the latest practices in multi-hazard and multi-sector risk assessments, established to meet the challenges emerging from increasingly interconnected and systemic risks. 

Where do we stand? 

A survey by the OECD highlighted that while many countries had strategies to manage risks in some critical infrastructure sectors, few map interdependencies across sectors and only half have the capacity to identify new, unforeseen and complex crises (OECD, 2018).  The COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis further underscore the need to address these shortcomings. The increasing frequency and scale of shocks calls for application of better risk analytics to guide and underpin national and sectoral plans, investments, and resilience building. 

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction stipulates that the global community must come to terms with a new understanding of the dynamic nature of systemic risks. New structures are needed to govern risk in complex, adaptive systems and new tools for risk-informed decision making are required. Only with such approaches can human societies flourish amid uncertainty. Coming to terms with the limitations of a hazard-by-hazard view of risk management, the Sendai Framework encourages dialogue and action to refine, extend and enhance our ability to understand and manage systemic risks.  

Member States, the UN system, and partners need to be better equipped to undertake multi-hazard and multi-sectoral risk assessments. More cross-sectoral collaboration is needed in order to move beyond linear risk analysis. Interconnected and systemic risk requires informed multi-stakeholder action.

Session guiding questions 

• How can we transition from hazard-by-hazard risk assessments towards multi-hazard and multi-sectoral risk assessments? 
• What lessons, good practices and use-cases can be distilled from emerging practices, and what approaches can be pointed to that have been effective in reducing aggregate risk and barriers across sectors? 
• What does this transition to assessing multi-hazard, multi-sectoral and inter-connected risk mean for communities of practice in terms of building the state-of-the-art, ensuring the fitness of analytic tools and approaches, improving risk data and information ecosystems, and broader risk governance across institutions at multiple levels?