From Frameworks to Implementation: Addressing Systemic Risk in the Real World

The authors examine how to bridge the gap between growing scientific understanding of systemic risks and the practical implementation of effective responses. They argue that although research has advanced in identifying how risks interact, compound, and cascade within and across systems, approaches to assessing and responding to these dynamics remain insufficiently applied. Drawing on the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment’s (ASRA) methodological framework, the paper emphasises the importance of integrating multiple perspectives and analytical methods, an explicit focus on power, vulnerability and transformation, making the centrality of nature explicit, and incorporating uncertainty and equity into systemic risk assessment and governance. It introduces ASRA’s Systemic Risk Response criteria, tested through eight pilot applications, noting that only a minority of existing responses assessed met the criteria on sanctity of nature, compassion and transformation, and discusses examples of promising responses, including Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench, climate litigation in Australia, and Amsterdam’s adoption of Doughnut Economics. The authors also explore the potential of artificial intelligence to accelerate systems mapping and risk assessment, while cautioning against biases, hallucinations, and the exclusion of marginalised perspectives. Finally, the paper presents STEER, an online tool designed to make systemic risk assessment and response frameworks more accessible to decision-makers, and argues that it is no longer adequate to address risks in a piecemeal or siloed way, since deep consideration of systemic risks leads to a realisation of the need to transform away from the harms they could produce.