Symposium Agenda
The program integrates inspiring speakers and conversations with hands-on working sessions, and space to discover new possibilities at the intersection of crisis and opportunity. Continue reading below for detailed descriptions of our interactive breakout sessions.
Breakout Sessions | Sunday, 8 June
These interactive sessions will provide participants with the opportunity to deep-dive into specific risk domains and work together to translate insights into action. A central component of the symposium’s agenda, participants are asked to opt-into their preferred sessions in advance via this survey (deadline 9 May 2025). While we know some may be disappointed about selecting only one session per day, we've worked hard to design a program that offers every attendee a rich mix of experiences—balancing meaningful deep dives into areas of interest with opportunities for networking, engagement, and reflection.
1 | Rethinking Systemic Risk Assessment
ASRA has developed a systemic risk assessment (SRA) framework to address this challenge. In this session, we will explore the SRA framework and examine how it builds upon existing risk management approaches while incorporating critical lessons from current and historical systemic crises. Participants will see firsthand how the framework can be practically applied to a mix of socio-economic and political contexts, including through using ASRA’s new web tool. We will also discuss how different stakeholders can use this framework to meet their unique systemic risk assessment needs.
2 | Rethinking Systemic Risk Response
Can public, private, and civil society actors redesign and improve systemic responses to interconnected crises? What would such “systemic responses” need to consider? Could an existing intervention become systemic? ASRA has developed systemic risk response (SRR) criteria as part of its new web-based tool to support policymakers, practitioners, and anyone interested in addressing the interconnected challenges we face. In this session, participants will gain firsthand insight into the tool’s practical applications and supporting case studies. We will also explore how different stakeholders can understand and apply criteria to strengthen their systemic risk responses at multiple scales and in varying contexts.
3 | Living and Acting in Uncertainty
How can we navigate uncertainty in and beyond risk assessment? In this session, we will explore approaches for understanding uncertainty in systemic risk assessment and response while developing contextually grounded and participatory responses. ASRA endeavours to go beyond narrow definitions of risk, toward a broader “systemic” understanding. Through analyses of current and historical examples, participants will gain insights into similar efforts to get to a more holistic understanding of risk and its implications for governance. Participants will be encouraged to share their experiences and contribute to building a fuller picture of how to handle uncertainty across different contexts.
4 | Understanding the Transformative Potential of Diverse Knowledge
How would the design, implementation, and outcomes of systemic risk assessment and response differ if we embraced multiple ways of perceiving and understanding risk? Traditional risk management often relies on siloed data and specialized professional knowledge. In this session, we explore the transformative potential of integrating diverse knowledge sources—from Indigenous wisdom to lived experience to warm data—while making explicit the values and assumptions that shape our understanding of systemic risk. Participants will bring their own lived experiences, expertise, and knowledge into discussions to explore how under-represented forms of knowledge and world views can change the way we—individually and collectively—tackle systemic risks.
5 | Imagining Futures
How can we navigate away from harmful systems and envision transitions towards regenerative, beneficial futures? This session explores the diversity of methods to imagine and explore a range of futures, including foresight approaches that can drive transformative change across interconnected systems. In this interactive session, we will share a range of tools and techniques that participants can embed into their own work to help navigate systemic risk. We will also discuss the psycho-socio factors that can shape how people think about the future and suggest how to incorporate this into our futures exercises.
6 | Channeling Finance for Systems Change.
Why do some systemic risks receive attention from the global financial sector while others are ignored? Are systemic risks suffering from severe underinvestment compared to investments in risk preparedness and response across multiple domains? Drawing on recent events, we will deep-dive into how the finance sector activates new risks by looking at the role of NGOs, think tanks, consultants, regulators, and market actors in establishing new risk recognition. Participants will be encouraged to imagine innovative, novel, or evidence-based scalable mechanisms to motivate and mobilize financial flows into resilience-building as well as explore ways to better align resources and actions to address interconnected global challenges.
7 | Seizing Policy Windows for Systemic Impact
How can we overcome barriers and leverage policy windows to integrate systemic risk thinking into governance? What are the key opportunities, and how can we strategically influence them? As global risks escalate and interact, policymakers often struggle with fiscal constraints and cognitive overload, defaulting to crisis-driven responses that hinder systemic change. Yet why do some policy windows enable transformative action? In this session, we will explore upcoming opportunities—through multilateral processes, election cycles, and strategic shifts—offering practical strategies to embed systemic risk approaches. Drawing from real-world cases, participants will identify actionable pathways to mainstream systemic governance for long-term resilience.
8 | Rethinking Risk to Recognize the Sanctity of the More-than-Human
How can we rethink risk as a way to recognize and honour the sanctity and interdependence of non-human life and ecosystems? In this session, we challenge the anthropocentric framing that dominates today’s polycrisis discourse by collectively exploring and then testing the concept of “nature-centricity.” What is systemic risk for Fox, Bristlecone Pine, Oakmoss Lichen, Blue Whale, and Hummingbird? Building toward a co-created vision of a nature-centric future, participants will explore how changes in interspecies encounters and relationships could radically transform current approaches in systemic risk assessment and response. We will then compare contemporary case studies of systemic risk assessment and response with our nature-centric vision.
9 | Placing Justice-Centred Approaches at the Heart of Systemic Risk
Risk governance systems often rely on static assessment models that do not account for perception divergence and prioritization bias, with tangible consequences. They systematically overlook threats that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Critical challenges facing vulnerable populations remain chronically underfunded, perpetuating cycles of inequality and vulnerability. In this session, we explore how to ensure that processes for systemic risk governance do not inadvertently lock people into harm, inequity, or indebtedness, focusing on how to operationalize justice across different scales and contexts, including perception differences, temporal differences, and accountability mechanisms.
10 | Understanding and Influencing Narratives
What narratives can support transformative action on systemic risk? In this session, we explore the crowded landscape of narratives surrounding systemic risk, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and connections. Participants will workshop this terrain to uncover strategic openings to influence the underlying belief systems and assumptions that shape what is considered relevant, possible, and legitimate. Together, we will reflect on how these narratives appeal to deeper values and worldviews, how they sustain and defend themselves, and where strategic openings exist to create new approaches and understandings more suited to our collective challenges.
11 | Mainstreaming Systemic Risk from Global to Local
How do we bring systemic risk into the mainstream? In this session, we will explore opportunities to embed systemic risk understanding and action in public and private sector planning and governance, as well as to civil society and community-level decision-making. We will examine barriers and incentives to mainstreaming, and identify potential first movers. Through collaborative dialogue, participants will explore strategies to scale systemic risk practices effectively and equitably, and consider the pace at which this needs to happen in order to address the urgency of today’s interconnected crises.
12 | Understanding Systemic Risk Interactions as Polycrisis
Why does it seem like everything is going wrong at the same time? In this session, we will explore the interactions between systemic risks and how they define our era. We will also review the emergence of the term “polycrisis” and the rapid development of the field of polycrisis analysis. Through facilitated dialogue and interactive activities, participants will explore new ideas, tools, and methods that can be used to examine the stresses, triggers, and crises driving the current polycrisis. We will also discuss the ambitious solutions and governance strategies needed to address this unprecedented challenge.
Wavemaker Side-Events | Monday, 9 June
These side-events will provide participants with the opportunity to deep-dive into specific risk domains and work together to translate insights into action. Participants are asked to opt-into their preferred sessions in advance via this survey (deadline 9 May 2025).
1. Perceptions of the Future and our Quest for Change.
There is a general dissatisfaction about the way multilateral organisations have been tackling crises and an accompanying pessimism about their capacity to effectively address present and future global shocks. This session we will explore whether human actors (political elites and citizens) perceptions about the future affect the functioning of multilateral institutions and the advancement of radical and effective common solutions to global shocks and systemic risks.
2. Systemic impacts of next-generation artificial intelligence.
Even as increasingly transformative AI reshapes global systems, the longer-term effects of more advanced artificial intelligence remain deeply uncertain. This session will explore the intermediate-term systemic challenges of AGI—ranging from employment disruptions and geopolitical impacts to economic automation and societal adaptation. We will brainstorm key challenges and consider potential intervention strategies as part of the early steps of deep uncertainty approaches. After a brief framing presentation, participants will engage in structured small-group discussions to brainstorm and share insights.
3. How can systemic risk approaches help ensure that climate neutral cities are also resilient cities?
Cities stand at the frontline of the climate challenge. Significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions while adapting to the effects of climate change requires robust strategies that consider their complex interrelationships and deep uncertainties. The objective of this side-event is to explore how systemic risk assessment and response can be grounded and mainstreamed in the ongoing planning and implementation of climate neutrality efforts in (initially) European cities. Concrete examples will be intertwined with theoretical discussions.
4. Managing Derailment Risks.
In a new climate reality of rapidly worsening climate impacts, a previously overlooked connection between the physical risks of climate change and the transition risks created by the need to move away from fossil fuels is manifesting itself. As climate impacts increase, they start to threaten society’s ability to transition, by hollowing out structural and economic capacity, increasing political polarisation and geopolitical tension. We call this previously overlooked connection ‘derailment risk’. In this session, we will introduce some of the derailment risks that we identified by engaging with more than 150 experts in climate, energy and economic policy, and explore a prototype facilitation process for mapping and exploring the mitigation of derailment risk.
5. Understanding and Addressing Systemic Risk in Humanitarian Action.
Join us for an interactive side event on systemic risk in humanitarian action! Explore how interconnected crises—climate, conflict, and socio-economic—compound vulnerabilities and how humanitarian organisations can evolve to meet these challenges. Engage with experts through creative exercises, real-life examples, and scenario-based dilemmas. Participants will help shape a collective perspective paper, offering actionable recommendations for the future of humanitarian response. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn, reflect, and contribute to a more resilient future in humanitarian action!
6. Can we prepare for catastrophic systemic failure? An interactive exploration.
The irreversible collapse in civilization’s integration and continuity is an accelerating risk. This reflects both its inherent fragility, and the interactive impacts through it of intensifying ecological-resource-economic-financial-social-political-natural stresses and shocks. The outcome would be a rapid shut-down in the flows of goods and services. Following a scenario involving the collapse of the financial system, we invite participants to engage in an interactive exercise to explore how societies might prepare. In small teams, they will receive missions related to an impending catastrophe, subject to constraints of deep uncertainty and societal reaction.
7. Addressing Systemic Risks in Cyberspace
Cyber-attacks exploiting systemic cyber risks could have a rippling effect cascading beyond organizations, sectors, or nations causing widespread devastation and disruption of critical services such as finance, health, manufacturing, supply chain, utilities, government service, agricultural production, or defense services. They could cripple national and global economies. If the defense sector and nuclear facilities, power grids, or supply chains are impacted, these risks could pose existential threat to the human race. The threat landscape is constantly evolving with emerging technologies such as AI, making risk identification, assessment, mitigation, and response challenging. Various aspects of systemic cyber risks will be presented to facilitate focus group discussion on.
8. Friction Point: Where Global Risk Meets Radical Innovation
Warning: This is not for the faint-hearted. The world is changing faster than ever. Traditional strategies are dead. We've created the ultimate high-stakes simulation that transforms how global leaders think, decide, and survive. In just one immersive experience, you'll: 1) Navigate complex global scenarios; 2) Make lightning-fast decisions; 3) Turn uncertainty into your strategic weapon. Limited spots available for those brave enough to rewrite the rules of global strategy. Are you ready to lead where others hesitate?
9. Flooding the Zone: Systemic Risk and Conscious Chaos.
In 2025, the deliberate tactic of ‘flooding the zone’ has overwhelmed information channels, triggering reactivity and shock, and dulling our capacities to think clearly. This session explores the significant mismatch between systemic risk approaches—which often assume a degree of background consensus and favor technocratic solutions—and our increasingly zero-sum, conflictual conditions. How does this work when ‘consensus reality’ breaks and systemic risk is actively courted? This session is a chance to stay with and explore this confusion and disorientation.
10. Resilience and Systemic Risk Quantification: Methods and Applications.
Resilience quantification is of crucial importance in the area of interconnected systems affected by systemic risks. This panel will discuss methods and application of resilience and systemic risk quantification in physical and social science and applications in government and industry. Specific case studies in Federal Government and World Bank will be discussed. The audience will gain appreciation of complexity of this topic and the need in applying cutting edge methods and tools.
11. Development at Risk: Embracing Change and Unleashing Opportunity amid Uncertainty.
In June 2025, UNDP will publish a report on “Development at Risk”. As a contribution to the policy debate on “rethinking and reimagining development” in times of polycrisis and uncertainty. The starting point of the reflection is the realization that structural transitions that are unfolding across the world unleash greater and more complex risks, accompanied by heightened uncertainty and volatility. The session will start with an overview of the report and its recommendations followed by an open plenary discussion to explore why risk management should become an integral part of development work and how to operationalize it in development work.
12. Systemic Risk Response in Action: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why.
Minerals are essential for the transition, but their supply chains are unstable, politically sensitive, and dirty. This session moves to real solutions. TMP’s Transition Minerals Program tackles systemic risks through coordinated action with businesses, governments, and communities across 15 countries. Through five case studies— from lithium mining (Chile) to policy (Japan)—participants will see what is effective. This interactive workshop offers practical insights into stabilizing supply chains, reducing conflict, and managing risk, providing a practical “how-to” on addressing systemic risks.
13. No Signal: Data Outages and Systemic Risk.
This session explores the systemic risk posed by climate-driven data centre outages. Dr Karl Mallon will present new global analysis of physical climate risk to thousands of data centres worldwide. Participants will engage in a cross-sector workshop to examine how digital infrastructure failures could trigger cascading impacts across critical systems—from finance to emergency services. The session will inform a joint XDI–ASRA report on climate resilience in the digital age.
14. Worlds in Collision, Emerging Responses: Looking Back 2025-35.
In this session you will journey into the future: undertaking a mini futures exercise in a workshop setting, adapted from ParEvo, a collaborative process for imagining and exploring alternative futures. In this session you will be challenged to imagine new, novel systemic risk responses that could evolve over the next 10 years to help people and nature transform away from the harms of systemic risks. Could this include mindset shifts stemming from a deep understanding of earth relations, paving the way for a new eco-ethical cooperation, All People All Species Assemblies, or dynamic systemic risk dashboards on your phone? Bring your imagination and critical thinking skills!
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