Overview
The Centre has compiled a compendium of threat maps, analytics and data layers, as a toolkit for assessing international risk of business disruption.
The Global Risk Index references the classical story of Pandora’s Box of All Ills and is the culmination of a research track that the Centre for Risk Studies has been pursuing since its inception.
This analysis suite consists of a probabilistic event set of over 12,000 catastrophe scenarios representing 22 threats, with potential to cause disruption to economic activity in 279 of the world’s most important cities, responsible for 41% of the world’s GDP.
The consequences of these events are quantified in terms of their ‘GDP@Risk’ – a constant metric that can be used to compare and standardise different types of threat.
Impact of cyber attacks continues to increase across the world
The potential impact of cyber attacks on the economy of the world’s largest cities has risen by nearly 9% in the last year, according to the 2019 update of the Global Risk Index from the Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School. Cyber risk has now risen from seventh to sixth place among global threats in the index.
Expanding the cyber threat model
Building on years of cyber research the Centre has done, we plan to extend the cyber threat model to individual cyber models that represent real events that can occur within an organisation such as data breaches, cloud outages, extortion, financial theft and DDoS. Research is underway at the Centre to map these exposures to corporate balance sheets and city economies alike.
Additional consequence models
The consequences of the scenarios will be extended from estimating GDP@Risk by adding other types of impacts to the modelling of the events. For insurance use cases this will extend to insurance underwriting loss assessments, derived in terms of index values for different lines of exposure. For international businesses, the consequence modelling will be extended to revenue loss and other operational impact metrics resulting from the scenarios, as needed to support the use case applications.
Trillion dollar scenarios
Tail events are being explored by identifying all threat events with the potential to cause a loss to the global economy of a trillion dollars or more. The universe of trillion dollar events will continue to be developed to characterise the frequency and characteristics of the distribution of extreme potential shock events.
Adding contagion and cascades
The analytical framework will be extended to incorporate contagion of shocks through the global economy, to improve the representation of impacts of localised events elsewhere in the world. The analysis will also explore the potential for one shock event to trigger other shock events in a cascade of consequences.
Real-time event interpretation
As part of our catastrophe scenario research, we are compiling historical case study precedents and calibrating models of likely consequences of unfolding events. We propose to explore the application of these techniques for businesses to respond to potentially threatening current events, by providing interpretation and analysis of the implication of events for various business activities.
