Overview

As we grow increasingly reliant on information technology, communication systems, and infrastructure service continuity, it becomes even more vital to explore the emerging risk of disruption and catastrophic failure of these critical systems. With global disasters like the pandemic causing major disruption, the Centre for Risk Studies focuses on analysing these risks and making systems more resilient.

Here at the Centre for Risk Studies we apply a forensic eye to emerging risks and potential sources of catastrophes that are less well understood, such as the 2016 solar storms. We estimated their potential disruption to the power supply and the vulnerabilities of the integrated critical infrastructure systems that underpin society and the economy. Not only did our team calculate cyber risk and track the changing landscape of hacker technologies and motivations, as well as the potential for correlated cyber attacks causing losses to multiple companies, we also looked at global financial connectivity and international financial crises.  

Centre for Risk studies research.

Research focus

The Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies has gained a worldwide reputation for its innovative research in the analysis, understanding and management of systemic risk. This involves scenario development, network analysis techniques, modelling of catastrophic events from the level of cities up to macroeconomic views and a study of the resulting impacts on economies and markets.

The Centre is proactive in distributing research outputs to a community of subscribers. Through the ongoing programme of interaction and community-building, the Centre has confidence its research is relevant to business and industrial partners and has real impact.

Current research

Explore the current tracks of research the Centre is pursuing.

Emerging and systemic risks

Delving into emerging and rapidly changing risks, we develop stress test scenarios as a way of understanding and managing these threats.

Use cases of research

Developing scenarios to help us understand new threats – we use this technique to build on years of precedents in management science.

Cambridge Global Risk Index

Focusing on the use of research outputs to improve business decision-making. By engaging with different business sectors, our research has a deeper impact.

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