Accelerating systemic risk assessment
to navigate a polycrisis world
The Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) mobilizes a diverse global network of risk professionals and thought-leaders, including the next generation, to advance the field of systemic risk. Faced with multiple, interconnected, and compounding crises in global systems, ASRA is a new and unique initiative committed to radically rethinking risk as a way to improve decision-making about current and future challenges.
Systemic risks are multiplying and intensifying -- from geopolitical conflict, the erosion of democracy and emerging technological risks like AI and biotechnology to pandemics, biodiversity loss, ecological degradation, climate change, inequity, and more. All of these risks pose the threat of irreversible harm.
Awareness of the interconnectedness of risks is growing. Yet, the mainstream frameworks, methodologies, data, and tools we use to assess and respond to risks today are insufficient to effectively grapple with the dynamic reality of interrelated risks. Systemic risks pose fundamentally different challenges compared to risk assessment of any single problem.
The continued failure to adopt a more systemic approach to risk not only steers social, ecological, economic, and political systems onto dangerous and uncertain trajectories but also further accelerates the gap between the threats to which earth’s ecological systems and humanity are exposed and our capacity to handle them.
The need
Our mission
Our mission is to accelerate transformative action that protects the earth’s ecological systems and humanity from the threats of escalating systemic risks. We pursue this mission by:
1. Galvanizing a diverse, transdisciplinary global network of risk practitioners and thought-leaders to collaborate and work together across sectors, disciplines, worldviews, genders, geographies, and generations.
2. Catalyzing the science and practice of systemic risk assessment and analysis including innovative and rigorous frameworks, methodologies, data, and open-source tools.
3. Strengthening systemic risk response capacities and highlighting opportunities for action and intervention adapted to global, national, and sub-national contexts.
4. Advocating strategies, approaches, and perspectives about systemic risk that build support for urgent systems transformation.
ASRA is an independent, not-for-profit initiative hosted by the United Nations Foundation.
We Accelerate Systemic
Risk Assessment
