Disasters rarely happen in isolation. A flood can damage healthcare and sanitation systems, making it harder to prevent disease outbreaks. Extreme heat can increase the risk of infectious diseases, while a previous crisis can leave communities more vulnerable to the next one. Climate change is making some hazards more frequent or severe, while growing populations and urbanisation are increasing the number of people and infrastructure exposed to them. Yet we often still study and prepare for these risks separately. This makes it harder to understand how different hazards interact, how their effects build on each other, and what we can do to reduce the overall risk.

In a recently published paper, an interdisciplinary group of researchers looks at what is needed to move towards a more comprehensive approach to disaster and climate risk management. They explore five core challenges that need to be addressed in order to move towards the Comprehensive Disaster and Climate Risk Management approach, which has been proposed within the newly emerging paradigm of a more holistic approach to managing the risks associated with climatic and/or non-climatic hazards and non-climatic risk drivers across varied time scales and levels. These five challenges relate to the following points:

1. We have a lack of comprehensive and high quality data for observing how society is impacted by, prepares for, and responds to multi-risks.
2. As a result we have a limited understanding of why individuals, communities, and other decision-makers (fail to) prepare for complex multi-risks in the way they do, and how that affects their responses.
3. Our capacity to simulate how current and future risk could be effectively reduced is hampered by the aforementioned lack and fragmentation of observations and understanding of multi-risk dynamics.
4. Current governance structures often reinforce data and knowledge silos.
5. The high complexity and wicked nature of the multi-risk problem results in barriers in knowledge exchange at the science, policy and practice interface.

The paper elaborates on each of these challenges, discusses why they matter for comprehensive disaster risk management, and provides ideas of how to overcome these challenges.

Read the full publication here.

This study was performed in part by researchers from the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Center (PDPC), and was first published on September 24, 2026 in NHESS:

Ward, P. J., de Ruiter, M. C., Boersma, K., Cesuroglu, T., Clark, N., Comes, T., Dahal, A., Fransen, S., Verschuur, J., Anthonj, C., Balakrishnan, S., de Bruijn, J., Hendriks, E., Mena Fluhmann, R., Perlaviciute, G., Steg, L., van den Homberg, M. J. C., van Westen, C., Atun, F., Schreijer, A.  & van Maanen, N. (2026). Invited Perspectives: Science for Comprehensive Disaster and Climate Risk Management. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 26(9), 4589-4609.