Re-imagining Risk and Disruption: The Nature of Complex Unbounded Problems

In a turbulent world, this timely book offers a distinctive exploration of major global challenges. It identifies the shared, underlying attributes of ‘Complex Unbounded Problems’ that make them so challenging and offers insights into how these challenges form – often unnoticed – how they coalesce, cross boundaries, exceed our response capacities and leave a long tail of impacts, exposing unsoundness in both knowledge and policy.

With a particular focus on Earth System change, nuclear power and emergencies, pandemic threats and the risk of cascading crises in near-Earth space, the book explores future directions for tackling risk and disruption, with emphasis on foresight capacity and a better understanding that, since disaster potentials link up, successful responses must do so as well.

Re-imagining Risk and Disruption is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of global environmental change, risk and disasters, security, technological safety and development studies. It will also benefit policymakers and practitioners in NGOs and international organisations working on public health, security, infrastructure and the environment.

Peter M. Weiske, Adjunct Lecturer, Stephen Dovers, Emeritus Professor, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Australia, William J. Durch, Distinguished Fellow, Stimson Center, Washington DC, USA and John Handmer, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Vienna, Austria