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Publication Date
13 December 2021

Assessing Current, Compounding, and Co-Evolving Risks Across Multiple Systems and Sectors: A Triage-based Visualization Platform

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Physical and transition risks across the natural, managed, and built environments are becoming increasingly complex, multi-faceted, and compounding. Changes to the future landscapes of socio-economic and environmental stressors and drivers co-evolve, interact, and lead to salient tipping points and instabilities. Yet – to provide resilient and adaptive solutions require in-depth, risk-based analyses and model assessments. However, deep-dive efforts are intensely consumptive in terms of computational and investigative resources. In practical terms, such exercises must be performed selectively in terms of priority, scale, and/or the critical nature of the threat. Therefore, an efficient analysis platform through which the variety of multi-systems/sector observational and simulated data can be readily incorporated, harmonized, combined, diagnosed, visualized, and shared with the community-at-large would prove a useful screening-level capability.

In view of this, a “triage-based” visualization and data-sharing platform has been constructed to survey, overlay, and combine supporting data on the landscapes of risks across resource systems, demographics, and infrastructures. A multi-sector risk index can be created (and downloaded) from a user-defined weighted combination of indicators based on relevance and sectors-of-concern. The platform's risk metrics diagnose land-, water-, and energy systems, demographics, critical habitats, transportation networks, as well as human health stressors and environmental diversity. We will demonstrate this platform’s ability to highlight multi-system "hotspots" of risk at the county-level geographic granularity over the United States (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico). These risk metrics are then projected into future changes based on the Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) framework. The web-based platform is an open-science tool and available to the community-at-large. We view the continued development and enhancement of its capabilities through an open, accessible, and interactive approach with the academic, research, public, and stakeholder communities.

Schlosser, Adam, Shelli Orzach, Cypress Frankenfeld, Xiang Gao, Angelo Gurgel, Alyssa McCluskey, Jen Morris, Sergey Paltsev, Sebastian Eastham, and John M Reilly. 2021. “Assessing Current, Compounding, And Co-Evolving Risks Across Multiple Systems And Sectors: A Triage-Based Visualization Platform”. In American Geophysical Union (Agu) Fall Meeting. New Orleans/Online. https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/959531.
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