Changing the Rules to Soften Humanity’s Hard Landing: A Systemic Risk Approach to Everything Going Wrong at Once

As promised, Part II of my two-part hot take sequence on the UNDRR Global Platform and the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) Symposium.

The TLDR is reproduced below, click the link to read the full blog (15 min read). 

• Part II of a two-part blog series reporting on a pair of crisis/disaster risk conferences – this one covers the ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium, which offered a refreshing contrast to the UN’s symptom-focused approach detailed in Part I.
• ASRA brought systems thinking to crisis management – 250 multidisciplinary experts tackled interconnected “polycrisis” issues rather than isolated disasters, focusing on the deeper stresses that drive cascading failures.
• Keynote speakers delivered transformation-focused messages – Poet Ben Okri challenged humanity to become “the people our times require,” while Christiana Figueres emphasised that “linear thinking has no place” in addressing systemic risk.
• Practical tools emerged alongside theory – ASRA launched STEER, a beta tool for systemic risk assessment, and workshops demonstrated hands-on polycrisis analysis and intervention design using real global stresses and future scenarios.
• The hard truth: single solutions won’t work – Whether it’s capitalism, carbon emissions, or specific leaders, there’s no single root cause to our interconnected crises; siloed institutions impede the interdisciplinary approaches we desperately need.
• Bottom line: humanity has the frameworks and community, but the race against time continues – ASRA provided genuine hope and practical starting points, but whether this scales fast enough to prevent humanity’s “hard landing” remains the crucial question.