How can we prepare to face the risks of today and those of tomorrow?

Climate change, geopolitical tensions and technological advances contribute to an increasingly complex risk landscape across Europe. These risks can spread and interact across sectors, amplifying or exacerbating each other’s effects as they unfold. Climate change, for example, fuels more frequent and severe wildfires, which degrade air quality. In turn, this can affect human health and put a strain on healthcare systems.

Moreover, these risks often affect multiple regions across national borders, making it impossible for individual countries to manage them in isolation. For example, floods regularly transcend borders, affecting infrastructure and communities across multiple countries.

What phenomena are most likely to trigger cascading effects?

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) analysed 47 risks spanning natural, technological, societal and geopolitical domains. This analysis resulted in a report exploring how current and emerging risks interact with each other to generate compounding effects and cascading impacts.

The report identifies the drivers that are most likely to influence multiple risks: geopolitical instability is the most common one, followed by weak governance, climate change, urbanisation, environmental degradation, and technological development.

Towards anticipatory and inclusive preparedness

While the risk landscape in Europe is well documented, there is significant fragmentation across risk definitions and classification, methodologies, and standards. These differences create challenges, but also contribute to building a richer and more nuanced overview. The report highlights the need for better interoperability and coordination to capitalise on this diversity of sources. It calls for the development of a comprehensive EU risk assessment framework, capable of accounting for multiple hazards and enabling coordination across sectors and borders with a whole-of-society approach.

Investing in foresight and scenario planning should also be a priority. Foresight should be expanded to address high-impact, low-probability risks: events such as solar storms, pandemics and nuclear incidents which, although rare, could have severe consequences across multiple sectors.

Scenario planning should include the so-called Earth system tipping points. These are thresholds that, if crossed, would lead to devastating and often irreversible consequences. At least five of the sixteen identified tipping points could be crossed if average global temperatures rise by more than 1.5 °C. As crossing these tipping points is no longer an unlikely scenario, the EU should integrate these possibilities into its risk planning.

Background

The report is based on a comprehensive analysis of 38 reports from EU institutions, as well as relevant scientific publications and stakeholder consultations. It builds on the JRC’s 2024 analysis of cross-border and emerging risks in Europe, which involved over 60 experts and underscored the growing complexity and interconnectedness of disaster risks across Europe.

Looking ahead, the JRC will strengthen the EU’s capacity to anticipate and respond to systemic risks through the Anticipation, Risks, and Resilience portfolio, which brings together research on societal resilience, disruptive events, and long-term threats.

The report supports the EU preparedness union strategy and aligns with frameworks such as the Union Civil Protection Mechanism and its disaster resilience goals, as well as the European climate adaptation strategy.