What do holidays and disaster planning have in common?

Why systemic risks demand new thinking

Traditional risk assessments provide useful maps of where risks exist now, but they fall short when it comes to showing how risks evolve as societies grow, infrastructure ages, and climates change. They tend to focus on single hazards, which rarely occur in isolation. MEDiate aims to close this gap by creating tools that help decision-makers by not just showing them today’s vulnerabilities but also anticipate future ones.

Why compromise fails

Most decision models reduce stakeholder preferences to averages. On the surface, this looks balanced. In reality, it often leads to outcomes that nobody prefers.

Take disaster risk planning:

• Local authorities enforce strict building codes to ensure safety.
• Developers focus on keeping costs down.
• Residents worry about housing affordability and access to services.

The averaged result may be building codes that are too weak to keep people safe but still expensive enough to upset developers and residents. Nobody is satisfied, and such solutions are unlikely to be implemented effectively.

The holiday metaphor

Think of it like planning a holiday. Half the group wants to visit a city full of museums. The other half wants to hike in the mountains. The compromise? A small village halfway in between. A little bit of nature, but no real mountains. One tiny museum exploring the village´s history, but nothing like a city. In the end, nobody enjoys the trip.

IIASA´s Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) group uses methods that highlight options which balance competing priorities and remain strong under different scenarios. The DSS then allows policymakers to test these options: How would stricter building codes perform under future earthquake conditions? What happens if urban growth continues without better planning? Which strategies hold up best when several hazards strike at once?

Building resilience together

Crucially, stakeholders are not brought in at the very end but involved from the very beginning. Their preferences are mapped, debated, and tested against scientific models. The result is a shared process that builds trust and ownership.

That is why IIASA’s role goes beyond models and data. We focus on the dialogue that makes legitimate and lasting decisions. Resilience cannot be built by numbers alone—it requires people working together, agreeing on pathways they can all stand behind.

The MEDiate project shows how science and society can find common ground. In the end, resilience is not built in models alone—it emerges when communities, scientists, and policymakers move together in the same direction.

We would like to express acknowledgment to Vladimir Shchepashchenko for his great contribution during his internship period at the CAT/ASA group at IIASA.