Neither the pandemic, nor the climate crisis, nor geopolitical conflicts are anymore viewed as “black swans.” Over the past five years, they have evolved into recurring, intersecting, and mutually reinforcing risk factors. Companies, states, and markets are confronted with a new reality: threats no longer exist in isolation. They overlap, accelerate, and impact multiple fronts simultaneously—supply chains, financial flows, human capital, and digital infrastructure. Managing such risks using traditional methods is no longer feasible.
Systemic Risks Require Systemic Thinking
The convergence of these forces means risk categories can no longer be siloed into “health,” “environment,” or “foreign affairs.” A disruption that begins in one domain can quickly cascade into others, triggering effects that are wider, faster, and more unpredictable than traditional models assume. Understanding each driver individually remains necessary, but the real challenge lies in recognizing how they interact.
The Pandemic
COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of global business models. In 2020, the global economy contracted by approximately 3.1%, and international trade by almost 9%. But the main blow fell not on the numbers, but on the processes. Companies accustomed to just-in-time operations lost access to components, personnel, and logistics simultaneously.
The pandemic highlighted an important issue: most risk models failed to account for prolonged, undulating crises. Unlike financial shocks, the virus did not act instantaneously but over months, changing the rules of operation as the game progressed. Those who survived relied on supplier duplication, remote work, and the redistribution of functions between regions.
Interestingly, similar approaches have begun to be applied in high-risk digital services, including casino en ligne le plus payant en France, where platform resilience, server redundancy, and payment system flexibility have become essential to survival. The pandemic has demonstrated that resilience is the capacity to adapt quickly.
Climate Risks
While only ten years ago, climate change was perceived as a long-term threat, it now directly impacts the economy. According to Munich Re, in 2023 alone, total damage from extreme weather events exceeded $250 billion, with less than half insured. Floods in Germany and Belgium, droughts in Southern Europe, and wildfires in Canada and Australia are among the current statistics.
Climate risk is multilayered. It includes physical threats (infrastructure destruction), transition risks (regulatory changes, emissions taxes), and reputational consequences. Companies that fail to consider environmental factors face rising capital costs and investor losses. ESG has ceased to be a buzzword and has become a filter for access to financing.
A particular challenge is that climate events often coincide with other crises. Drought can trigger migration, thereby increasing social tensions and, subsequently, political instability. Such a cascade of effects is difficult to model when climate is considered in isolation.
Geopolitics
After the end of the Cold War, many companies assumed that geopolitical conflicts were a thing of the past. Events in recent years have shown otherwise. Trade wars between the US and China, sanctions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the disruption of energy ties have reshaped the global business landscape.
A striking example is the energy crisis in Europe since 2022, which has resulted from sanctions imposed on Russia. The sharp rise in gas and electricity prices led to production shutdowns, rising inflation, and a rethinking of industrial strategies. Companies tied to a single region or political partner found themselves in a vulnerable position.
Geopolitical risk is difficult to hedge. It evolves rapidly, decisions are made without economic logic, and the consequences affect multiple markets simultaneously. In such circumstances, traditional business continuity plans are often ineffective.
How to Prepare for Multifactorial Threats
Modern risks require holistic thinking. Recent best practices indicate that resilience is built on a combination of analytics, organizational agility, and a culture of embracing uncertainty. One key finding is the move away from linear scenarios. Companies are increasingly using stress tests, simulating the simultaneous impact of multiple factors: for example, a climate event, sanctions, and a logistics disruption.
Decentralization also plays a key role. Distributed teams, regional decision-making centers, and autonomous IT systems reduce the “single point of failure” effect. This applies to both manufacturing companies and digital platforms, where infrastructure resilience directly impacts user trust. Finally, the role of risk management is also changing. It is no longer a reporting function but rather a part of the strategy. Companies that integrated risk management into investment and operational decisions demonstrated the best adaptation in 2020–2024.
The key elements of preparing for multifactorial threats can be summarized as follows:
- diversification of supplies, markets, and partners;
- scenario modeling that simultaneously considers multiple risks;
- investments in digital resilience and cybersecurity;
- revision of insurance programs to account for new types of losses;
- development of a culture of uncertainty acceptance at the management level.
Companies that perceive risks as an interconnected system, rather than a set of individual threats, gain a strategic advantage.