Towards systemic resilience : rebuilding global security before 2030
- il y a 4 jours
- 5 min de lecture
The world no longer manages isolated crises. It endures polycrises — shocks that cascade through increasingly coupled critical systems. A flood is no longer purely a weather event: it weakens the energy grid, overwhelms hospital capacity, fuels social tensions and can open a window of opportunity for hostile actors. Natural disasters, industrial accidents and cyber threats now belong to one and the same security continuum. By 2030, decision-makers will need the courage to drive the deep changes this demands.
By Hugo Dupin
A world of compound risks
The figures leave no room for doubt. In 2024, 393 disasters worldwide were linked to natural hazards¹, causing nearly 17,000 deaths, affecting 167 million people and generating 242 billion dollars in economic losses. In parallel, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recorded more than 117 million forcibly displaced people in 2023 — a historic record in which conflict, economic crises and climate disasters feed off one another. The Global Risks Report 2026 confirms this shift: geoeconomic confrontation has overtaken armed conflict and extreme weather events to become the top global risk. Fifty percent of the experts surveyed in that same report anticipate a turbulent or chaotic world within two years, 57% within ten. “Rising geopolitical tensions and the erosion of trust are fragmenting the landscape of global risks… Leaders have a choice: find ways to strengthen collaboration and resilience, or face an accumulation of vulnerabilities,” cautioned Mirek Dušek, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum.²
Polycrisis: beyond simultaneity
“The polycrisis is not a buzzword: it is the interconnection of multiple shocks — climate, economic, technological, conflict-driven — bound by causal interdependence and complex feedback loops, well beyond mere simultaneity,” says Louis Delannoy, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Back in 2015, a cyberattack attributed to the Sandworm group plunged 230,000 Ukrainians into darkness — the first documented cyber-induced power outage, repeated the following year. In 2022, the blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports halted grain exports and sent a food shock wave as far as North Africa and the Middle East. “The crises we are witnessing today produce cascade effects: climate impacts infrastructure, which affects health, then security and social cohesion. Crises must no longer be treated as isolated events, but as interconnected phenomena that cut across sectors, geographies and time-scales,” Delannoy explains.
The institutional blind spot
Faced with this reality, the institutional response remains structurally behind. Silos between ministries and agencies are still the rule, public-private coordination remains inadequate, and standards vary from one state — sometimes from one region — to the next. According to international indices, global critical infrastructures — energy, telecoms, water, health, transport — are only about 50% prepared for major crises. The floods in the Ahr Valley (Germany, July 2021, 180 deaths) made it plain: despite alerts available several days in advance, the institutional chain failed to convert them into evacuations³ — the same blind spot was on display during the Lahaina wildfires in Hawaii in 2023.⁴ “The challenge is not only technical: our institutions are not designed to integrate complex systemic dynamics into their decision-making processes,” Delannoy stresses. Modernising tools without overhauling governance architectures merely shifts the breaking point.
Several pillars for operational resilience
The converging strategies of the European Union, NATO and the most advanced states outline an action framework built first and foremost on anticipation. It rests on harmonised, multi-channel early-warning systems capable of cross-referencing heterogeneous data — meteorological, health-related, geospatial, socio-economic — to identify risks before they materialise. Artificial intelligence, big data and shared digital twins now make it possible to model multi-hazard scenarios and anticipate cascading effects at regional or global scale. Japan’s earthquake early-warning system, for example, automatically halts high-speed trains in the seconds before tremors hit. The challenge is therefore not technological but political. Deploying these capabilities requires a willingness to share information that national-sovereignty reflexes continue to hold back. Protecting critical infrastructure requires network segmentation, energy and digital redundancy, regularly tested backup plans — and above all, the build-up of sovereign industrial capacities: trusted cloud infrastructure, secure medical supply chains, strategic equipment. The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022, followed by a series of undersea cable ruptures in the Baltic Sea, have turned undersea infrastructure into a new front line. On land, the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline in 2021 had already deprived part of the US East Coast of fuel for several days. Critical dependency is itself a national-security vulnerability. What is currently unfolding in the Near and Middle East is a stark example. Coordinated response is where speed and coherence become decisive. Cross-sector crisis centres bringing together public, private and non-profit actors make it possible to break down decision-making silos in real time. The twin earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023 showed the cost of poor coordination: access constraints, the multiplicity of responders and weak cross-border corridors delayed relief during the most critical first hours.⁵ Such coordination presupposes interoperability — technical, doctrinal and human: without compatible command systems or cross-border protocols, every major crisis reveals the same fractures. NATO has drawn the consequences by raising resilience to an obligation under Article 3 of the Treaty, backed by seven baseline requirements that every ally must meet.⁶
Polysolutions demand courage
Instruments exist The European Civil Protection Mechanism and its rescEU reserve, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund, the WHO Pandemic Agreement adopted in 2025 by 124 members: these multilateral architectures are solid foundations. The rescEU reserve, for instance, has been activated several times during Mediterranean wildfires. But these instruments remain underused, underfunded and too often activated in reaction rather than in anticipation. Crisis management calls for investment in joint exercises — UN, NATO, EU, NGOs, private sector — for a risk culture diffused at every level, and for systematic lessons-learned processes. Several states have already made that choice: Finland structures its defence around a “comprehensive security” model linking administrations, businesses and citizens; Sweden distributed its “If Crisis or War Comes” brochure to nearly five million households in 2024; Singapore has cultivated its “Total Defence” doctrine for decades. The real constraint is not budgetary. It is political. Shifting from a reactive, sectoral, late-stage logic to an integrated, anticipatory, coordinated global response demands giving up national prerogatives, accepting the pooling of sovereign capabilities and investing on time horizons that electoral cycles render uncomfortable. “Faced with the polycrisis, there is no silver bullet: there are polysolutions, requiring coordination, anticipation and structural reforms — and they will demand political courage and a deep change to our current models,” concludes Louis Delannoy.
Further reading: “Sécurité globale et résilience : une recomposition stratégique majeure à l’horizon 2030,” Mélanie Bénard-Crozat, February 2026, Eurosatory – COGES. https://2dwl43.share-eu1.hsforms.com/2aovhe5ZoQmWe3V8uaJr3YA
1. According to the international EM-DAT database
2. WEF 2025
4. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/12/us/hawaii-emergency-warning-sys- tem-maui-wildfires/index.html — https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/us/ maui-sirens-silent-lahaina-what-we-know/index.html
