On 10th June 2025, the Disaster Resilient Societies (DRS) Stakeholder Hub hosted a webinar titled “Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment: Concepts, Tools & Applications” under The Crisis Management Innovation Network - Europe (CMINE) platform.
The session brought together leading voices from Horizon Europe-funded projects and critical infrastructure stakeholders to explore how we assess, interpret, and respond to interconnected risks in an increasingly complex world.
Dr Rui A. P. Perdigão represented the C2IMPRESS (Co-Creative Improved Understanding and Awareness of Multi-Hazard Risks for Disaster Resilient Society) project in this event, actively taking part in this timely and relevant discussion, sharing insights from C2IMPRESS’s ongoing work to support dynamic, integrated, and stakeholder-centred disaster resilience.
Key Themes of the Webinar
The webinar focused on:
- Understanding cascading and compound risks across systems and regions.
- Moving from asset-level to systemic-level risk thinking.
- Bridging the gap between frontier scientific research and operational uptake.
- Emphasising co-creation and stakeholder engagement in developing risk intelligence tools.
- Identifying legal, governance, and implementation barriers to effective tool adoption.
Understanding the Broader Landscape
The webinar, hosted by Benjamin Hall from CMINE, opened with an overview of the increasing urgency surrounding multi-hazard risk management. As climate change accelerates and infrastructures become more interconnected, a single disruptive event can have cascading and compounding effects across sectors and regions.
Speakers emphasised that the traditional hazard-by-hazard approach is no longer sufficient. Instead, there is a pressing need for system-level thinking, where inter-dependencies and feedback are not treated as edge cases, but are central to resilience planning.
Representatives speaking in the webinar included:
- Philip Ward, representing MYRIAD-EU: towards multi-risk assessment and management
- Dr Chen Huang, representing the MEDiate (Multi-hazard and risk-informed system for Enhanced local and regional Disaster risk management) Project
- Dr Rui A. P. Perdigão, representing the C2IMPRESS (Co-Creative Improved Understanding and Awareness of Multi-Hazard Risks for Disaster Resilient Society) project, and
- Dr. Raghav Pant, representing the MIRACA (Multi-hazard Infrastructure Risk Assessment for Climate Adaptation) project.
The speakers shared their efforts to model complex risk landscapes while embedding stakeholder voices into the research and tool development process. Several use cases were highlighted, ranging from climate-induced infrastructure risks in Slovenia and Greece to collaborative governance challenges in the Netherlands and Spain.
C2IMPRESS: Capturing Complex System Dynamics
Representing the C2IMPRESS project, Dr Rui A. P. Perdigão delivered a compelling presentation on how our work is redefining multi-hazard risk assessment through a System-of-Systems (SoS) lens. Unlike traditional risk models that isolate hazards or linear cause-effect chains, the C2IMPRESS framework treats risks as emergent properties of highly dynamic, interconnected systems.
“Our forecasts are meaningful,” explained Dr Perdigão, “Because what you do to the land affects the weather—not just the climate in the future, but the weather now.”
With this framework, C2IMPRESS integrates real-time Earth observation data with process-based modelling, enabling it to capture not just the presence of a hazard, but the underlying interactions that amplify or dampen its effects.
For example, a flood that saturates agricultural land is not only an immediate hydrological concern, but also a significant economic concern. It also alters soil chemistry, changes heat exchange processes, and can influence short-term local meteorology. These nonlinear feedback loops are often invisible to conventional models, but are central to our approach.
Dr Perdigão elaborated on this:
“When you change what is on the land interface to the atmosphere, you inherently change the weather regime… and in the local event scale, that was usually not captured. But our System-of-Systems indeed captures those feedbacks.”
By acknowledging that natural and social systems are co-evolving, C2IMPRESS is creating tools that are not only scientifically robust but operationally relevant to those on the ground.
Addressing Challenges in Uptake and Co-Creation
A recurring theme across the webinar was the challenge of translating research into practice. Many projects highlighted the difficulty of integrating advanced risk models into decision-making processes, particularly when tools are developed without sufficient input from the intended users.
C2IMPRESS directly confronts this issue through a co-creation methodology that involves stakeholders from the very beginning. As Dr Perdigão noted, the solution is not to “build a bridge between science and practice” but to ensure that science and practice evolve together.
“When we develop the language together, we don’t need translation. When we build science together, we don’t need a bridge,” he stated. “We’re not afraid of being in the field. We’re not afraid of being with the people. Because we are the people.”
This ethos of co-evolution guides every aspect of the C2IMPRESS project: from model design and data integration to interface development and policy alignment. By working alongside emergency responders, infrastructure operators, and local authorities, we ensure our outputs are technically sophisticated yet accessible, flexible yet grounded in the operational realities of crisis management.
Highlighted Projects at a Glance
Apart from C2IMPRESS, several Horizon Europe projects were featured during the webinar, each tackling multi-hazard risk from different lenses:
- MYRIAD-EU: Shared how involving six sectors from the proposal stage helped tailor tools for real-world risk management in energy, agriculture, tourism, and wetlands.
- MIRACA: Focused on how climate-induced hazards affect interdependent critical infrastructures, with use cases across the Netherlands, Greece, Slovenia, and Spain.
- MEDIATE: Discussed the importance of engaging end-users as partners, not just test subjects, and highlighted legal challenges around data sharing and tool implementation.
Looking Ahead: Shared Intelligence for a Resilient Future
The DRS Hub webinar was not only an opportunity to share innovations but also to reflect on the broader direction of disaster resilience research in Europe. The conversation reinforced the need for continued collaboration across projects, open data frameworks, and legal clarity around tool implementation, particularly for cross-sector use.
From the C2IMPRESS perspective, the future of multi-hazard risk assessment lies in anticipatory intelligence: tools that can sense, learn, and adapt to changing conditions in real time, built through deep collaboration with the communities and institutions they serve.
As Dr Perdigão concluded:
“Only when we work together—scientists, practitioners, communities—can we achieve a shared, safer future.”
We remain committed to that vision and look forward to furthering these dialogues as the project evolves.
📺 Watch the full webinar here: DRS Hub Webinar – YouTube
🌐 Learn more about C2IMPRESS: www.c2impress.com
This project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No 101074004.