Resources curated from or related to the semninar series

• JPL’s Science Understanding from Data Science (SUDS) Initiative
• Awesome Multi-Hazards library: A curated list of multi-hazard science, analysis, application, and impact
• Knowledge Action Network on Emergent Risks and Extreme Events: A group addressing systemic emergent and cascading risks under global and societal change while building knowledge on disaster risk reduction and providing an open platform to scientists across disciplines.
• MultiSector Dynamics: A multi-disciplinary collective of researchers based at universities and national labs across the United States to establish a community of practice of MultiSector Dynamics (MSD) researchers and improve our understanding of the co-evolution of human and natural systems over time, and build the next generation of tools that bridge across sectors (energy, water, land, economy) and scales (spatial, temporal), and offer a holistic view of systems-of-systems.
• Report from the June 9, 2025 “Complex Risk Science Summit” in Boston that details the key dialectics for Complex Risk Science and Analysis Working Groups that can begin responding to them] (and here is the link to the Boston Risk Science Summit page).
• more coming

Resources by Seminar

## Missing Links in Predicting Future Extreme Weather Risk Dr. Jane Baldwin, UC Irvine — October 28, 2025

• JPL Climate Risk Science Workshop
  Workshop convened by JPL’s Climate Science group exploring climate risk, resilience, and interdisciplinary modeling approaches.
• Fifth Assessment Report — IPCC
  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), providing comprehensive assessments of climate change science and impacts.
• Nashville Complex Risk Case Study
  Pilot project with TVA and the City of Nashville examining how human vulnerabilities—including health, economic, and social factors—interact with compound climate risks such as extreme cold and power outages.
• EPRI Report: Fragility Curves and Climate Risk Assessment
  Introduces fragility curves—quantitative models relating physical climate hazards to vulnerability—and discusses their role in power system risk assessment and resilience planning.
• Understanding Fragility Curves
  Explains the concept and development of fragility curves as a means of linking hazard intensity to probability of failure for power system assets.
• Vulnerability in a Tropical Cyclone Risk Model: Philippines Case Study
  Case study applying a tropical cyclone risk model to the Philippines, highlighting dimensions of vulnerability and system exposure.
• ISIMIP — Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project
  An international network of climate-impact modelers producing harmonized data and cross-sectoral analyses of climate impacts across natural and human systems.
• LitPop Dataset
  Eberenz et al. (2020) provide globally consistent asset exposure data for physical climate risk assessment, combining nightlight and population information.
• World Bank: Measuring Well-Being
  World Bank publication offering conceptual and methodological frameworks for measuring human well-being and its determinants.
• FEMA’s Hazus
  FEMA’s standardized modeling tool for estimating potential losses from floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural hazards.
• EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database
  A comprehensive database of over 27,000 mass disasters worldwide since 1900, maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).
• Humidity’s Role in Heat-Related Health Outcomes: A Heated Debate
  Study examining how humidity modifies heat-related health outcomes and the implications for public health metrics.
• Interactions Between Indoor Heat and Energy Affordability
  Turek-Hankins et al. (2025) explore how energy affordability and building heat dynamics amplify household risk in hot-humid U.S. climates.
• Simplicity Lacks Robustness When Projecting Heat-Health Outcomes
  Vanos et al. (2020) demonstrate that overly simplified modeling approaches can undermine projections of heat-health outcomes in a changing climate.
• Wicked Problems
  Guru Madhavan’s book exploring how science, design, and policy intersect to address complex, intractable problems that cannot be solved within a single field.

## Emergence of risk, uncertainty, and resilience in social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) Dr. Elisabeth Krueger, University of Amsterdam — October 23, 2025

• Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems
  A foundational Ecology and Society paper outlining key concepts for understanding how social–ecological systems persist or transform under stress.
• A social-ecological-technological systems framework for urban ecosystem services
  Proposes a framework for linking social, ecological, and technological systems to manage urban ecosystem services more sustainably.
• Governing sustainable transformations of urban social-ecological-technological systems
  Discusses governance approaches for transforming urban systems toward sustainability, integrating insights from multiple disciplines.
• Maintaining human wellbeing as socio-environmental systems undergo regime shifts
  Explores how human wellbeing can be maintained during major environmental and social regime shifts.
• Flickering as an early warning indicator of critical transitions
  Introduces the concept of 'flickering'—short-lived transitions between states—as a potential early warning signal of critical shifts in complex systems.
• Governing the Commons
  Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work showing that self-governing institutions can sustainably manage shared resources, reframing Garrett Hardin’s 'tragedy of the commons.'
• Deep Uncertainty
  Overview of deep uncertainty and robust decision-making from the Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science (Walker, Lempert, and Kwakkel, 2013).
• Quantifying urban water supply security under global change
  A 2019 study quantifying urban water supply security in the context of global change and uncertainty.
• Reframing resilience-oriented urban water management
  Krueger et al. (2025) explore how social–ecological–technological interactions shape urban water management in water-scarce regions.
• Refining the Robustness of Social-Ecological Systems Framework
  Anderies et al. (2019) refine the SES framework for analyzing coastal system adaptation to global change.
• Moving from fit to fitness for governing water in the Anthropocene
  A perspective on adaptive governance in the Anthropocene, emphasizing dynamic 'fitness' over static institutional 'fit.'

## Resolving Risk in a Nonstationary World: Large Ensembles, Extremes, and Sustainability Dr. Sai Ravela, MIT — September 23, 2025

• LASSE: Learning Active Sampling for Storm Tide Extremes in Non-Stationary Climate Regimes
  A method for learning adaptive sampling strategies to better characterize storm tide extremes in changing climate regimes.
• Structured Thinking Matters: Improving LLMs Generalization in Causal Inference Tasks
  Research on enhancing large language models’ ability to generalize in causal inference through structured approaches.
• As sea levels rise, Bangladeshi islanders must decide between keeping the water out—or letting it in
  An article exploring adaptation choices for communities in Bangladesh as sea levels rise.
• Polycentric Games and Institutions
  A book on polycentric governance and its implications for managing shared resources and institutions.
• Sara Constantino (Stanford) research on social tipping dynamics
  Collection of publications on social tipping dynamics and collective behavior.
• Policy, Risk, and Norms Shape Collective Behaviors Worldwide
  A study by Sara Constantino and colleagues examining how policies, risks, and norms influence collective action globally.
• Micro Foundations of Climate Adaptation Governance in Small Island Developing States
  Presentation by Sara Constantino on how local governance and social dynamics influence climate adaptation in small island states.
• Social norms as solutions
  A Science article discussing how social norms can be leveraged as mechanisms for solving collective challenges.
• Climate and Tropical Cyclone Activity: A New Model Downscaling Approach
  Presents a new downscaling approach for studying tropical cyclone activity in the context of climate change.
• Vulnerability in a Tropical Cyclone Risk Model: Philippines Case Study
  Case study examining vulnerability in a tropical cyclone risk model applied to the Philippines.
• Bangladesh's Amplified Coastal Storm Tide Hazard from Tropical Cyclones and Rising Sea Levels in a Warming Climate
  Research showing how climate change is amplifying coastal storm tide hazards in Bangladesh.

## Complex Interconnected Systems:Risk-Informed Decisions for Situations of Compound Extremes Dr. Auroop Ganguly, Northeastern University — September 16, 2025

• Destruction perfected
  Pinpointing the nodes whose removal most effectively disrupts a network has become a lot easier with the development of an efficient algorithm. Potential applications might include cybersecurity and disease control.
• Network science based quantification of resilience demonstrated on the Indian Railways Network
  The structure, interdependence, and fragility of systems ranging from power grids and transportation to ecology, climate, biology and even human communities and the Internet, have been examined through network science. While the response to perturbations has been quantified, recovery strategies for perturbed networks have usually been either discussed conceptually or through anecdotal case studies. Here we develop a network science-based quantitative methods framework for measuring, comparing and interpreting hazard responses and as well as recovery strategies.
• Critical Infrastructures Resilience: Policy and Engineering Principles
  A first book on the analysis of interconnected infrastructure resilience
• Transdisciplinary electric power grid science
  Reliable electricity provides more than convenience; it fuels economies, governments, health care, education, and poverty reduction. As populations shift to cities and consume more energy, confronting the multifaceted challenges to reliable electricity becomes paramount.
• Recovery coupling in multilayer networks
  The increased complexity of infrastructure systems has resulted in critical interdependencies between multiple networks—communication systems require electricity, while the normal functioning of the power grid relies on communication systems. These interdependencies have inspired an extensive literature on coupled multilayer networks, assuming a hard interdependence, where a component failure in one network causes failures in the other network, resulting in a cascade of failures across multiple systems. While empirical evidence of such hard failures is limited, the repair and recovery of a network requires resources typically supplied by other networks, resulting in documented interdependencies induced by the recovery process. (the interconnection between transportation system and power grid has begun to be quantified in terms of resiliency).
• Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks
  Modern systems are coupled together and therefore should be modelled as interdependent networks. A fundamental property of interdependent networks is that failure of nodes in one network may lead to failure of dependent nodes in other networks.
• Beyond Markets and States
  Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems: Contemporary research on the outcomes of diverse institutional arrangements for governing common-pool resources (CPRs) and public goods at multiple scales builds on classical economic theory while developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of `the market' and `the state.'
• Usable climate science is adaptation science
  In the present historical moment, the only climate science that is truly usable is that which is oriented towards adaptation, because current policies and politics are so far from what would be needed to avert dangerous climate change that scientific uncertainty is not a limiting factor on mitigation.
• Physics-guided probabilistic modeling of extreme precipitation under climate change
  Earth System Models (ESMs) are the state of the art for projecting the effects of climate change. However, longstanding uncertainties in their ability to simulate regional and local precipitation extremes and related processes inhibit decision making. Existing state-of-the art approaches for uncertainty quantification use Bayesian methods to weight ESMs based on a balance of historical skills and future consensus. Here we propose an empirical Bayesian model that extends an existing skill and consensus based weighting framework and examine the hypothesis that nontrivial, physics-guided measures of ESM skill can help produce reliable probabilistic characterization of climate extremes.
• Climate Adaptation Informatics: Water Stress on Power Production
  Resilience to nonstationarity and deep uncertainty is a prerequisite to water security. Stakeholder planning horizons typically extend to about 30 years in water quantity or quality management, flood or drought hazard resilience, or the water-energy-food-ecosystems nexus. Projections of stressors, such as population, land use, stability assumptions of technologies, infrastructures, and organizations, are relatively more credible at the nearer term. However, compared to longer lead times of mid- to end-century and beyond, climate adaptation challenges are more acute.
• Coarse-graining
  The challenge of 'averaging out' is taken up by the complexity science community often with the language of `coarse-graining'
• DeepSD: Generating High Resolution Climate Change Projections through Single Image Super-Resolution
  The impacts of climate change are felt by most critical systems, such as infrastructure, ecological systems, and power-plants. However, contemporary Earth System Models (ESM) are run at spatial resolutions too coarse for assessing effects this localized. Local scale projections can be obtained using statistical downscaling, a technique which uses historical climate observations to learn a low-resolution to high-resolution mapping. Depending on statistical modeling choices, downscaled projections have been shown to vary significantly terms of accuracy and reliability. The spatio-temporal nature of the climate system motivates the adaptation of super-resolution image processing techniques to statistical downscaling.
• Hybrid physics-AI outperforms numerical weather prediction for extreme precipitation nowcasting
  Precipitation nowcasting, which is critical for flood emergency and river management, has remained challenging for decades, although recent developments in deep generative modeling (DGM) suggest the possibility of improvements. River management centers, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, have been using Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models for nowcasting, but they have been struggling with missed detections even from best-in-class NWP models. While decades of prior research achieved limited improvements beyond advection and localized evolution, recent attempts have shown progress from so-called physics-free machine learning (ML) methods, and even greater improvements from physics-embedded ML approaches. Developers of DGM for nowcasting have compared their approaches with optical flow (a variant of advection) and meteorologists’ judgment, but not with NWP models. Further, they have not conducted independent co-evaluations with water resources and river managers. Here we show that the state-of-the-art physics-embedded deep generative model, specifically NowcastNet, outperforms the High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model, which is the latest generation of NWP, along with advection and persistence, especially for heavy precipitation events.
• EPRI's Climate READi Initiative
  As 1-in-50 or 1-in-100-year extreme events of the past increase in frequency, and society increasingly depends on electricity, EPRI is strengthening the power sector’s collective approach to managing climate risk to the power system. And as the economy electrifies and decarbonizes, energy grid reliability and resilience will be paramount. Energy companies, regulators, policymakers, and other industry stakeholders require science-based insights about the future power system and the environment in which it will operate to identify optimal adaptation and resilience investments. EPRI’s collaborative model will convene the global thought leaders and scientific researchers necessary to build an informed and consistent approach.