Towards a transdisciplinary framework for systemic risk detection

Abstract

Detecting and managing systemic risk is a major growing challenge for the 21st century. Due to the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of social-technological-biophysical systems, stakeholders will fail to promptly identify key early warning signals of systemic risk if relying on individual disciplines, or a combination of disciplines that are not well coordinated. Our paper argues that transdisciplinary approaches are required to make comprehensive and integrative assessments of complex systems. To support stakeholders in undertaking such assessments, we propose a framework that will assist them in: 1) better understanding their system and the risks to which it is exposed; 2) selecting complementary disciplines, theories and methods that are relevant to the system in question; and 3) integrating knowledge from these different disciplines to detect a wide range of early warning signals of risk. The framework can be used as a foundation to build transdisciplinary approaches to systemic risk detection.