The world isn’t prepared to tackle emerging systemic risks — but it can be

South Africa’s Climate Justice Charter Movement, or CJCM, was launched in 2020 to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and a seven-year drought, both of which were posing multiple significant risks to the country’s population. Water and food resources were depleting alongside agricultural livelihoods and the health of communities. This is compounded by existing inequalities and issues of colonization and poor social justice.  

“A society that is racked with that level of inequality and vulnerability is one which is purely unattuned to be able to address, or even face, these multiple systemic risks,” said Awande Buthelezi, member of the National Coordination Committee of the CJC.

In Quito, Ecuador, the local government has also been mobilizing to tackle the risks it faces from socioeconomic exclusion, natural hazards such as earthquakes and floods, vulnerable supply chains, and food insecurity. “We depend heavily on food produced outside the city limits, which means the city must bring in large quantities of food through two main roads located at the northern and southern edges. These routes are often highly exposed to hazards, making the food supply chain vulnerable,” said David Jácome-Polit, former chief resilience officer for the city of Quito. If the roads are compromised, perhaps due to an earthquake or floods, it is estimated the city only has seven days' worth of food, with potentially serious health and economic consequences, he explained.

To work on protecting the city from these risks and the cascading impacts involved, in 2002, the municipality created the Participatory Urban Agriculture Program, which over the past two decades has supported the city’s most vulnerable people in producing their own organic food and income streams via urban farms. The Agri-food Pact of Quito, or PAQ, followed in 2017, committing coalition members from Quito’s public and private sectors, civil society organizations, academia, and cooperative agencies to building better local food policy. The two initiatives together have contributed to an extensive analysis of the vulnerabilities within Quito’s food systems and have identified measures that could safeguard the city from systemic risks via an eco-agri food system.

As a result, today, Quito has over 4,000 urban gardens and over 200 businesses that promote local, organic food production. Half of that food is for self-subsistence, while the other half is sold or shared to economically support families, said Jácome-Polit. The initiative addresses not only food insecurity but also health, livelihoods, and female empowerment, as the majority of the urban gardens are run by women. “When you start to create these spaces, it's not only that you can change the underlying reasons of why these problems emerge, but it also allows you to create better environments, opportunities for collaboration and partnerships, and more democratic responses to different risks,” he added.

In India, the Community Action Collab, or CAC, is another example of a collaborative adopting a systemic risk response. It is a humanitarian emergency platform born out of COVID-19 that collaborated with 370 civil society organizations in building resilience among vulnerable communities, such as the urban poor, migrant workers, fisherfolk, street children, and informal workers. The risks these groups face — be it climate disasters or health threats —  can disrupt their livelihoods and ability to live above the poverty line, jeopardizing access to education and health services.

“One health emergency depletes the savings of the entire household. One loss of crops will set everybody back because they have no savings,” said Shama Karkal, domain specialist, CAC. “We want to not only try and build capacity for households to be able to respond, stay safe, but actually adapt and not have to fall behind as much as they do currently.”

With that in mind, CAC convenes partner organizations in different districts of the country to design solutions around a specific problem. “Different kinds of coalitions with different entities to actually respond to vulnerable communities in their time of need is something that we [see] great success with,” said Karkal. For example, during the pandemic, CAC brought together private sector actors and the government to enhance the supply of medical equipment, vaccinations, and generate new business models to solve specific problems, she said.

In Zimbabwe, the NGO the Friendship Bench has, for over a decade, been inadvertently tackling the systemic risks of poverty and lack of access to employment while predominantly focusing on providing mental health support. It trains community elders in cognitive behavioral therapy so that they can then offer talk therapy in safe, outdoor, local spaces across the country before progressing clients to peer-led support groups and offering them opportunities to earn, perhaps through handicrafts. Initially starting with one bench, the Friendship Bench has become a national program adopted by the government at scale. In 2024, over 300,000 people visited a Friendship Bench in Zimbabwe, and 80% of those saw meaningful improvement, not just in their mental health but in other aspects of their lives. 

“When we started, we thought we were just focusing on clinical conditions, reducing symptoms of depression, but it's actually much broader than that. When you think of global mental health, you have to think systemically because reducing symptoms alone is not sufficient, because very often those symptoms are fueled by social determinants,” said Dixon Chibanda, psychiatrist and founder of The Friendship Bench. Such determinants might include intimate partner violence, poverty, or limited access to education, he said. Alleviating one of these can improve mental health outcomes.

The model has been so successful at addressing multiple risks — mental health, poverty, intimate partner violence, among others — that it is being replicated beyond Zimbabwe in countries such as Malawi, Kenya, Zanzibar, Vietnam, the United States, the United Kingdom, and El Salvador.