Interacting Geohazards, Systemic Risk, and Resilience Interventions across Coupled Human-Earth Systems

In Earth science and geohazard research, there is growing recognition that geohazard events and implemented responses to geohazard risks increasingly trigger interacting dynamics across scales and levels, leading to the emergence of systemic risk. Geohazards can introduce fragility into a system’s stability landscape or push an already fragile system into instability. When geohazards interact with structurally fragile and tightly coupled systems, nonlinear responses can amplify their impacts, producing system-level losses disproportionate to the magnitude of the triggering event and, in extreme cases, cascading failures or system-wide collapse. Therefore, these events -despite often being localized in time and space- can generate complex and dynamical impact systems beyond space and time.Over the last decades, various terms have emerged to describe such complex risk and hazard dynamics. (e.g., compounding, cascading, systemic, hybrid, etc.). We chose the term “interacting” to acknowledge not only the simultaneous and sequential nature of events and events’ impacts but also feedback and feedback loops among hazards and their circular impact pathways across temporal, spatial, and organizational scales. Beyond geohazard events, resilience interventions are similarly not immune to system-wide cascading or other interacting mechanisms. A resilience intervention is a practice of introducing change in a tightly coupled system to mitigate or respond to risk, where impact rarely remains in the sector, space, and time of the implementation. Such interventions involve inherent uncertainty and propagation patterns often ontologically complicated, structurally complex, and computationally too expensive to simulate. Hence, the impact of responses to geohazard risks, i.e., resilience interventions introduced, involves a complex impact system, including trade-offs, unintended consequences, and perhaps long-term systemic resilience outcomes inferior to the baseline.Traditional risk frameworks that treat geohazards through static (or insufficiently dynamic) assessments and simplified integration of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability have been frequently challenged by evidence of complex interactions within and among Earth systems that evolve over time. Therefore, over the last decade, compelling research has focused on developing conceptual, methodological, and analytical advances to understand and measure those dynamics among system components, including interdependencies, path dependency, feedback loops, and characteristics of systemic risk and resilience in the coupled Earth system.Recent studies highlight that interacting and cascading geohazards and their responses can unfold through strong nonlinear dynamic coupling among interconnected geophysical, hydrological, ecological, and human processes. These interdependencies amplify risk propagation (or the rate of propagation), creating feedback loops that sustain or intensify hazard impacts, alter system state, or create novel or latent vulnerabilities that affect responses to subsequent hazards. Yet, despite progress in modeling, monitoring, data, and computational capacities, critical uncertainties remain about how systemic perturbations evolve, what thresholds govern local and systemic failures, and how adaptation modifies georisks under rapidly and sometimes abruptly changing climate conditions, resilience capacities, and social processes.This Research Topic aims to advance understanding of systemic georisks and risk response as dynamic, multi-scale processes shaped by feedbacks among coupled geophysical, hydrological, ecological, and human processes, including infrastructure and governance. It seeks to bridge Earth system science, complexity science, geohazard modeling, systemic risk, and resilience studies by examining how and why initial stability landscapes, climatic, social, and infrastructural conditions drive the emergence and propagation of interacting hazards and systemic risk. The goal is to promote integrative approaches and conceptual foundations capable of eliciting and tracing the recursive and circular interactions between hazards and societal capacities and responses, thereby enhancing resilience and adaptive risk governance in the face of accelerating socio-techno-ecological change.To gather further insights into systemic geohazards and the conditions that generate systemic risks, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:● Modeling compound and cascading geohazards across interconnected socio-techno-ecological systems and scales (e.g., earthquake-landslide-debris-flow chains, seismically triggered liquefaction and lifeline failure, earthquake-tsunami-infrastructure failure, etc.).● Modeling cascading and interacting impacts and consequences of geohazard risk response and resilience intervention across interconnected socio-techno-ecological systems and levels● Earth system dynamic feedbacks linking tectonic, climatic, and hydrometeorological processes in systemic risk evolution.● Efficient mathematical computational methods for systemic risk and resilience analysis, including surrogate models, reduced-order approaches, and emulation.● Application of methods, such as System Dynamics modeling, Network Analysis, Agent-based Modeling, Machine Learning, Cross-impact Balance Analysis (CIB), etc, to coupled Earth and social systems under interacting geohazard events.● Simulation of interactions of human agents under disaster risk with perturbed networked infrastructures and the environment, including feedback loops and emergent resilience or collapse scenarios.● Machine learning, AI, and data-driven dynamical systems to identify early-warning signals of critical transitions, risk drivers, and enablers from past disaster data and identify patterns of self-organization in risk response.● Ethnographic studies, indigenous perspectives, and participatory approaches for co-creating simulations and developing complex adaptive systems (CAS) models of resilience in hazard-exposed regions.● Model dynamic feedbacks among interdependent and interconnected infrastructure, community, and governance, and their bottom-up accumulated response to hazards● Climate-driven amplification of climate-sensitive geohazards and their cascading and systemic impact and vulnerability● Infrastructure exposure, socio-ecological vulnerability, and adaptive capacity in multi-hazard regions● Advanced observational and modeling tools for tracking geohazard chains and network propagation (e.g., InSAR, satellite Earth observation, seismic and geodetic networks, remote sensing time series).● Methodological frameworks for dynamic risk assessment, risk- and resilience-based governance, and the compounding effect of sociopolitical fragility exposed to geohazard events● Systemic risk and resilience conceptual development, frameworks, and assessment approaches● Integrating complexity science, Earth observation, advanced data and analytical tools, and adaptive policy design in systemic risk and resilience governance Topic editors: Rui A. P. Perdigão, Erick Mas, Milad Zamanifar Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86129/interacting-geohazards-systemic-risk-and-resilience-interventions-across-coupled-human-earth-systems