Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AGILE (AGnostic risk management for high Impact Low probability Events)
Période du rapport: 2023-10-01 au 2025-01-31
In today’s interconnected world, risks are increasingly systemic. While globalization, digitalization, and climate change offer efficiencies, they also heighten vulnerabilities. Sectors such as public health, cybersecurity, and infrastructure are more exposed to cascading failures. As a result, communities face growing threats from High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events—rare, unpredictable crises with potentially catastrophic consequences for people, services, and societies.
Traditional risk assessments, focused on isolated threats and probabilities, fall short in addressing HILPs. AGILE adopts a risk-agnostic approach centered on systemic risk to improve preparedness and resilience. The project is built on three pillars:
Understand: Develop a multidisciplinary knowledge base to conceptualize and analyze HILPs for integration into disaster risk reduction (DRR) and management (DRM).
Anticipate: Co-develop and apply tiered stress tests with stakeholders to identify common points of failure in critical systems and enhance resilience planning.
Manage: Strengthen societal resilience through evidence-based planning, capacity-building, and risk communication.
AGILE blends advanced scientific methodologies with insights from disaster governance and social sciences to deliver interdisciplinary solutions. By addressing social, organizational, and policy dimensions, the project ensures its tools are scientifically robust and practically relevant for decision-makers.
Expected Impacts:
• Policy & Governance: Provide decision-makers with tools and methods to improve systemic risk governance and planning for complex emergencies.
• Community Resilience: Support diverse stakeholders—from global corporations to local organizations—with training and resources to better understand and manage HILPs.
• Scientific & Technological Innovation: Advance systemic risk assessment through a risk-agnostic lens, focusing on vulnerabilities and interdependencies.
• International Cooperation: Strengthen cross-border collaboration in Europe and beyond to support joint responses to transnational threats.
AGILE empowers policymakers, emergency planners, and community leaders with the tools and strategies needed to better understand, anticipate, and manage HILP events—building resilience in an increasingly complex world.
Traditional risk assessments, focused on isolated threats and probabilities, fall short in addressing HILPs. AGILE adopts a risk-agnostic approach centered on systemic risk to improve preparedness and resilience. The project is built on three pillars:
Understand: Develop a multidisciplinary knowledge base to conceptualize and analyze HILPs for integration into disaster risk reduction (DRR) and management (DRM).
Anticipate: Co-develop and apply tiered stress tests with stakeholders to identify common points of failure in critical systems and enhance resilience planning.
Manage: Strengthen societal resilience through evidence-based planning, capacity-building, and risk communication.
AGILE blends advanced scientific methodologies with insights from disaster governance and social sciences to deliver interdisciplinary solutions. By addressing social, organizational, and policy dimensions, the project ensures its tools are scientifically robust and practically relevant for decision-makers.
Expected Impacts:
• Policy & Governance: Provide decision-makers with tools and methods to improve systemic risk governance and planning for complex emergencies.
• Community Resilience: Support diverse stakeholders—from global corporations to local organizations—with training and resources to better understand and manage HILPs.
• Scientific & Technological Innovation: Advance systemic risk assessment through a risk-agnostic lens, focusing on vulnerabilities and interdependencies.
• International Cooperation: Strengthen cross-border collaboration in Europe and beyond to support joint responses to transnational threats.
AGILE empowers policymakers, emergency planners, and community leaders with the tools and strategies needed to better understand, anticipate, and manage HILP events—building resilience in an increasingly complex world.
AGILE has made significant progress in its scientific and technical work, with each Work Package contributing essential components toward the project's overarching goal of advancing systemic risk assessment and preparedness for High-Impact Low-Probability (HILP) events.
WP1 laid the theoretical and conceptual groundwork by establishing a comprehensive definition and taxonomy of HILP events. This taxonomy integrates socio-economic and cultural dimensions, ensuring a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to risk characterization. The analysis of 27 historical HILP events revealed shared vulnerabilities and cascading effects, while extensive expert interviews led to the development of an additional deliverable (D1.3) focused on fostering creativity and lateral thinking in scenario-building.
Building on this foundation, WP2 began by identifying stakeholder needs for the AGILE Knowledge Platform. Through surveys and workshops, the team defined user requirements, which informed the architecture and design of the HILP reference library (reported in D2.1). Development of the library is underway, with data being systematically gathered, validated, and triangulated from multiple sources. In parallel, the research framework for developing a classification model for HILP events will be finalized.
WP3 developed a tiered stress-testing framework to analyze systemic interdependencies. A key innovation was the introduction of “Tier 0,” which ensures comprehensive system mapping and stakeholder identification as a prerequisite for stress testing. A practical toolkit was created to support case study partners in implementing Tier 0. The WP has established a strong methodological base for upcoming stress test activities through targeted literature reviews, workshops, and regular coordination meetings.
WP4 advanced AGILE’s scenario-building capabilities by developing a methodology that maintains risk-agnosticism while ensuring applicability to real-world challenges. A scenario-building card deck is in development to support practical implementation. A cyclical schedule for stress test implementation has been agreed upon with case study partners. Two pilot stress tests are planned to refine and validate the Tier 1 methodology before broader deployment.
WP5 initiated the development of Evidence-Based Planning (EBP) guidelines through workshops and a comprehensive desk review. The research identified key barriers to integrating scientific evidence into decision-making processes and underscored the importance of a structured, iterative approach to embedding evidence in resilience planning.
Collectively, these scientific and technical efforts form the backbone of AGILE’s interdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing systemic risk, laying the groundwork for innovative tools, methodologies, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms that will benefit decision-makers and communities across Europe and beyond.
WP1 laid the theoretical and conceptual groundwork by establishing a comprehensive definition and taxonomy of HILP events. This taxonomy integrates socio-economic and cultural dimensions, ensuring a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to risk characterization. The analysis of 27 historical HILP events revealed shared vulnerabilities and cascading effects, while extensive expert interviews led to the development of an additional deliverable (D1.3) focused on fostering creativity and lateral thinking in scenario-building.
Building on this foundation, WP2 began by identifying stakeholder needs for the AGILE Knowledge Platform. Through surveys and workshops, the team defined user requirements, which informed the architecture and design of the HILP reference library (reported in D2.1). Development of the library is underway, with data being systematically gathered, validated, and triangulated from multiple sources. In parallel, the research framework for developing a classification model for HILP events will be finalized.
WP3 developed a tiered stress-testing framework to analyze systemic interdependencies. A key innovation was the introduction of “Tier 0,” which ensures comprehensive system mapping and stakeholder identification as a prerequisite for stress testing. A practical toolkit was created to support case study partners in implementing Tier 0. The WP has established a strong methodological base for upcoming stress test activities through targeted literature reviews, workshops, and regular coordination meetings.
WP4 advanced AGILE’s scenario-building capabilities by developing a methodology that maintains risk-agnosticism while ensuring applicability to real-world challenges. A scenario-building card deck is in development to support practical implementation. A cyclical schedule for stress test implementation has been agreed upon with case study partners. Two pilot stress tests are planned to refine and validate the Tier 1 methodology before broader deployment.
WP5 initiated the development of Evidence-Based Planning (EBP) guidelines through workshops and a comprehensive desk review. The research identified key barriers to integrating scientific evidence into decision-making processes and underscored the importance of a structured, iterative approach to embedding evidence in resilience planning.
Collectively, these scientific and technical efforts form the backbone of AGILE’s interdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing systemic risk, laying the groundwork for innovative tools, methodologies, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms that will benefit decision-makers and communities across Europe and beyond.
Current approaches to risk assessment and scenario development tend to focus on specific risks and their probabilities. Whilst there is a growing literature on multi-hazard analyses with related cascading effects and compound impacts, the focus remains risk specific. AGILE builds on this work but moves beyond it. AGILE does not focus on specific risks but instead uses a risk-agnostic approach to understand systemic risk and identify common points of failure that occur across different risks. As a result, AGILE provides more holistic insights for fostering societal resilience.