Recent work on vulnerability dynamics further shows that vulnerability changes through socio-economic and political transitions, long-lasting disasters, compounding events, and adaptation choices (De Ruiter and Van Loon, 2022; Albulescu and Armaș, 2024; Armaș and Albulescu, 2025).
Changing system architecture
System architectures are dynamic. Hazard impacts, recovery processes and adaptation strategies can temporarily disrupt connections or, conversely, increase connectivity through reconstruction and technological integration. These shifts reshape future cascade potential by altering redundancy, dependency patterns and coupling intensity.
Over time, such architectural evolution can move systems across systemic-risk tiers, either reinforcing cascade-permissive conditions or strengthening buffering configurations. As a result, architecture evolution feeds directly into the accumulation or mitigation of systemic vulnerability, linking short-term disruption dynamics to longer-term predisposition to cascading failure.
Predisposition and propagation
Within the proposed framework, systemic vulnerability functions as the predisposition layer of the interaction taxonomy. It explains why the same interaction type can remain locally contained in one system and become cascade-prone in another.
References
- De Ruiter, M. C., & Van Loon, A. F. (2022). A global review of the dynamics of multi-hazard vulnerability. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 22, 57–83. DOI
- Albulescu, A. C., & Armaș, I. (2024). An impact-chain-based exploration of multi-hazard vulnerability dynamics: The multi-hazard of floods and the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 24(8), 2895–2922. DOI
- Armaș, I., & Albulescu, A. C. (2025). From static to dynamic: Conceptual and operational developments of vulnerability. iScience, 28(3), 112070. DOI