Adopting a Transboundary Risk Management Paradigm in a World of Multi-hazard Risks

The risks, climatic and non-climatic, are increasingly integrating and interacting with each other across geographical and time scales. This is largely happening due to factors and processes outside the purview of the risk management community that they have mostly ignored for most of the risk management history. The recent pandemic COVID-19 has thrown sufficient light on this new paradigm. Though several previous global incidents have tried to bring to attention this fact, not sufficient attention could be brought to the issue. This is high time for all stakeholders to revisit their risk assessment and risk management approaches and look at all risks in an interconnected manner. Sectorally- and geographically-bounded risk assessments are passed. One may still want to conduct a sectorally- and geographically-limited risk assessment but that only gives a part of the risk picture and needs to be compared with the risk assessments that take a holistic picture of risks across sectors, time series, and political boundaries. Here, the message is not just taking a multi-hazard approach but taking an approach that cuts across political boundaries and time scales as risks accumulate over time and geographical scales. Keeping this in view, this paper makes a case for defining and addressing climate fragility in a multi-hazard and transboundary context. While doing so, it presents various short cases to derive messages relevant to climate fragility risk reduction.