Policy Brief: Integrating Multi-Hazard Risk Management Approach into Key EU Policies.

Urgent action is needed to address accelerating climate risk drivers and cater for cross-border, cascading and compound climate risks (EEA, 2024), yet policy preparedness is lagging in the EU and in Member States. How can policy-makers, practitioners and authorities, from the local to the Union’s level take action now and include compounding hazards, risk cascades, and wildcard events into climate risk assessments?

This policy brief tries to answer this crucial question and advise policy-makers on how to include the following recommendations into their thinking :

• Embed systemic multi-hazard risk assessments in all major EU climate and disaster- related strategies, using among others MYRIAD-EU methods and tools as reference implementations.
• Prioritise regional (climate) risk hotspots and place-based pathways, drawing on MYRIAD-EU Pilot Studies as templates and inspiration for hotspot-specific, co-created solutions.
• Improve inter-state and multi-sectoral integration through common scenarios, harmonised multi-hazard indicators (including non-economic losses), and better data interoperability, building on MYRIAD-EU’s outputs.
• Strengthen citizen engagement and disaster- risk intelligence by investing in impact- based early warning, civil-protection training, Earth Observation, and digital twins that can host and operationalise MYRIAD-EU outputs and support multi-hazard literacy.

This policy brief explains how the approach developed within MYRIAD-EU can contribute to the implementation of existing EU policies and support the development of future-proof European policies, to enhance the European Union’s capacity to manage complex, interconnected, multi-hazard, and systemic risks.