Beyond Disciplinary Silos and Data Limitations in Systemic Risk Research: Lessons from the 2021 Western European Floods

Abstract

Systemic risk research has emerged as a rapidly expanding field, motivated by the increasing interconnectedness and complexity of global socio-ecological, technological, and economic systems. Here we highlight that systemic risk differs fundamentally from conventional risk: it is characterized by multi-scale interactions, networked dependencies, trans-boundary effects, and the potential for cascading and compounding effects propagating through and across systems leading to system failure. Using the July 2021 Western European floods as an example, we show how different disciplinary perspectives capture important but partial aspects of the event while often overlooking the interactions and feedbacks through which impacts propagate. We argue that systemic risk research should not be driven solely by available data, as data scarcity and uncertainty increase with growing system complexity. Instead, a systemic risk perspective is needed that recognizes nonlinear dynamics, interdependencies, feedbacks, and trans-contextual information, while integrating qualitative and quantitative forms of evidence. We conclude that the primary value of a systemic risk perspective in research lies in revealing how climate-related risks interact, compound, and cascade across sectors and scales, thereby identifying system vulnerabilities and intervention points that are largely invisible in sector-specific analyses.