Invited Perspectives: Science for Comprehensive Disaster and Climate Risk Management

In this paper, we 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. First, we have a lack of comprehensive and high quality data for observing how society is impacted by, prepares for, and responds to multi-risks. Second, 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. Third, 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. Fourth, current governance structures often reinforce data and knowledge silos. Fifth, the high complexity and wicked nature of the multi-risk problem results in barriers in knowledge exchange at the science, policy and practice interface. In this paper, we elaborate on each of these challenges, discuss why they matter for comprehensive disaster risk management, and provide ideas of how to overcome these challenges. We end the paper with a brief outlook.