This paper investigates how Swedish disaster risk management has operationalised the concepts of multiple hazards and their cascade effects on critical infrastructures. Sweden is used as an example to identify both case-specific and generalisable results across a broader context, with transferable insight and learning applicable to the UK context.
The paper concludes that despite numerous methodologies being available for assessing multi-hazard and cascade impacts, these are rarely utilised and integrated into local planning, suggesting a gap between research and practice. The authors identify an over-reliance on technical assessments, at the expense of broader scenario planning. Alongside a failure to adequately account for wider societal interactions, cascading impacts from complex interactions, emergent vulnerabilities, and compound risks. This in turn creates new and unforeseen vulnerabilities and risks to society, economy and infrastructure systems.
Full paper from the Journal of Disasters