1pm-2pm, Wednesday 11 June 2025
VIDEO
This webinar helped participants to start to think systemically about the interconnected, and cascading nature of disaster risk.
AIDR welcomed Professor Lauren Rickards, Director of the La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab. Lauren drew on a range of systems ideas in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation research to explore what systemic risk means and why it matters for our work.
For the most part, our existing lifestyles and daily activities are heavily dependent on largely unseen and interconnected systems for the delivery of essential services when we need them (e.g. energy, water, food, health and education services, transport, and communications). These systems reflect a chain of accumulated decisions and choices made over generations, in different circumstances and with different priorities.
Current approaches to disaster risk reduction are being challenged in a world of more frequent and compounding hazards. As the population and economy continue to grow, increasing exposure is creating complex interdependencies that are leading to more systemic vulnerabilities.
The United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction has identified that a linear approach to managing risk is no longer sufficient, given the systemic nature of disaster risk. We need to better understand the consequences of disasters, how these can cascade through systems, where the boundaries of systems lie, and where the fragility in the connections within and between systems lie.
Guest Speaker:
Professor Lauren Rickards Director of the La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab
Lauren is Director of the La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab. With colleagues within and affiliated with the Lab, she is using innovative social research to examine: the impacts of climate change on the sectors of society that sustain us (including government, environment, agriculture, water, education, health and emergency management); the far-reaching implications of these impacts for our collective wellbeing; and the deep, multi-level adaptation required.
Primarily a geographer by training, Lauren was a Lead Author with the Australasia chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. She has a DPhil in Human Geography from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BSc (Hons) in Ecology from the University of Melbourne.
Dr Neville Ellis Manager of the Climate Adaptation Program
Neville Ellis is the Manager of the Climate Adaptation Program for the Western Australian emergency management sector, based within the Department of Fire and Emergency Services. He was formally a Contributing Author and Chapter Scientist on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1.5°C Special Report and has published research in various prestigious international journals. Neville is particularly interested in systemic risk and social-ecological resilience and their implications for emergency management.
Host:
John Richardson
