Article by Rod Schoonover, Daniel P. Aldrich, and Daniel Hoyer: “The emergent reality of complex risk demands a fundamental change in how we conceptualize it. To date, policymakers, risk managers, and insurers—to say nothing of ordinary people—have consistently treated disasters as isolated events. Our mental model imagines a linear progression of unfortunate, unpredictable episodes, unfolding without relation to one another or to their own long-term and widely distributed effects. A hurricane makes landfall, we rebuild, we move on. A pandemic emerges, we develop vaccines, we return to normal.
This outdated model of risk leads to reactive, short-sighted policies rather than proactive prevention and preparedness strategies. Key public programs are designed around discrete, historically bounded events, not today’s cascading and compounding crises. For instance, under the US Stafford Act, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) must issue separate declarations for each major disaster, delaying aid and fragmenting coordination when multiple hazards strike. The National Flood Insurance Program still relies on historical floodplain maps that by definition underestimate future risks from climate change. Federal crop insurance supports farmers against crop losses from drought, excess moisture, damaging freezes, hail, wind, and disease, but today diverse stressors such as extreme heat and pollinator loss are converging with other known risks.
Our struggle to grasp complex risk has roots in human psychology. The well-documented tendency of humans is to notice and focus on immediate, visible dangers rather than long-term or abstract ones. Even when we can recognize such longer-term and larger-scale threats, we typically put them aside to focus on more immediate and tangible short-term threats. As a result, lawmakers and emergency managers, like people in general, often succumb to what psychologists and cognitive scientists call the availability heuristic: Policies are designed to react to whatever is most salient, which tends to be the most recent, most dramatic incidents—those most readily available to the mind.
These habits—and the policies that reflect them—do not account for the slow onset of risks, or their intersection with other sources of hazard, during the time when disaster might be prevented. Additionally, both cognitive biases and financial incentives may lead people to discount future risks, even when their probability and likely impact are well understood, and to struggle with conceptualizing phenomena that operate on global scales. Our mental processes are good at understanding immediate, tangible risk, not complex risk scenarios evolving over time and space…(More)”.
