Addressing the complexity of disaster risk management: analysis of Natech events in the context of climate change

Starting from the observed crisis affecting geosciences also in the context of disaster risk management, this paper discusses how to effectively face systemic risk and vulnerability of complex systems, considering cascading, compounding and consecutive accidents as a tool and a proxy to identify an appropriate methodology for systemic risk analysis. A particular category of 3C events, namely natural hazards triggering technological events, or Natech events, has been analysed in the context of climate change. In particular, information from three different databases of interest have been combined to gain insights about Natech events in the United States. Evidences have been acquired about hurricanes (by far the strongest weather-related hazard) that indicate a divergence between a slow, constant, decline in Natech events over the last decades, and an increase of hurricanes’ consequences in term of damages and victims, while the influence of climate change on hurricanes is not clearly visible in the period considered. This research points out that Natech events clearly have the inherent capacity to cause non-linear consequences, not always negative, as they have the ability to foster unpredictable improvements in the overall system robustness, otherwise reached by the industry in deferred times, if ever.