What are Cascading Disasters?

The authors argue that the world’s dependence on networks and critical infrastructure renders it increasingly vulnerable to “cascading disasters” in which “it is common for the secondary effects to be new sources of impact, which may be more devastating than the original trigger.” To help analyze the vulnerability pathways through which disaster cascades propagate, they overview the efforts of the Cascading Disasters Research Group at University College London to measure the magnitude of cascading disasters and distinguish five types of complex disaster impact, and they highlight recent progress in studies of cross-domain network dependencies.