The Global Risks Forum (GRF)
Systemic risks cross disciplinary lines: a drought becomes a food, health and finance problem, and no single field holds the evidence for the whole chain. Research dialogue is the structured exchange through which disciplines and institutions agree shared questions, compare framings and record where they still disagree. This page sets out how that dialogue is organised, how its quality can be judged, and what it can and cannot settle for the institutions that rely on it.
GRF · Established · service level R0
Interdisciplinary risk research dialogue is the structured exchange through which disciplines and institutions agree shared questions about systemic risks, compare how each frames them and record where they still disagree. Its quality shows in who takes part, whether disagreement is written down and whether follow-up research is commissioned.
For risk research dialogue, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, flood water and night lights with clouds now from NASA GIBS, framed on Europe; 3 further NASA layers wait in the list.
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NASA GIBS / EOSDIS · ASTER GDEM (METI, NASA) · Blue Marble (NASA) · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) · Natural Earth
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For risk research dialogue, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, flood water and night lights with clouds now from NASA GIBS, framed on Europe; 3 further NASA layers wait in the list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Risk research dialogue · Science-policy panel · Synthesis SY-05
| Reduced losses | 4 | Moderate | Benefit |
| Faster recovery | 7 | Low | Unclear |
| Equity of access | 6 | Very low | Unclear |
Cross-disciplinary research themes. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Each discipline defines the problem, the unit of analysis and acceptable evidence differently. Without explicit translation, groups talk past each other, and a shared word such as resilience carries several incompatible meanings.
Funding calls, journals, promotion criteria and departmental budgets reward work inside one discipline. Cross-disciplinary themes stay under-resourced even when the risk itself is systemic, so gaps sit exactly where risks interact.
Dialogue is shaped by who is invited, who can afford to attend and which language is used. Researchers from lower-income settings and holders of non-academic knowledge often arrive late or not at all.
Summaries of dialogue tend to report consensus and drop dissent. When the record loses the reasons for disagreement, later readers mistake an open question for a settled one, and the error travels into policy.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interdisciplinary research | Research that integrates data, methods, concepts or theories from two or more disciplines to answer a question none could answer alone. |
| Transdisciplinary research | Research that brings non-academic actors such as officials, operators and communities into defining questions and producing knowledge. |
| Framing | The way a problem is defined, which shapes what counts as evidence, which disciplines are asked and which options are considered. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interdisciplinary co-authorship on a risk theme | percent of outputs on the theme | annual | Bibliometric records | OBSERVED |
| Funding awarded through cross-disciplinary calls | national currency; share of competitive funding | annual | Funder award records | OFFICIAL |
| Participation in dialogue by region and sector | participants by category | per event | Dialogue records | REPORTED |
| Recorded points of disagreement | count per dialogue record | per event | Dialogue records | REPORTED |
| Fields contributing to a theme | number of fields | annual | Topic classification of publications | ESTIMATED |
| Mentions of dialogue outputs in policy documents | count per period | annual | Policy document indexes | REPORTED |
| Follow-up research commissioned on a theme | count of funded projects | annual | Funder award records | OFFICIAL |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAlex | Open index of works, authors, institutions, topics and citations for mapping research themes | Open, CC0 |
| Crossref metadata | Publication, funding and update metadata registered by publishers | Open, metadata free to reuse |
| UNESCO Science Report | Periodic review of research systems, priorities and cooperation by country and region | Free to read, CC BY-SA IGO |
| CORDIS (European Commission) | Records of EU-funded research projects, partners and outputs | Free reuse, attribution |
| National research council award databases | Awards by programme, discipline and institution, such as UKRI Gateway to Research and NSF award search | Open Government Licence or public domain, by council |
| International Science Council publications | Reports on transdisciplinary research and global research priorities | Free to read, terms per report |
Research Nexus prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Research councils and funders | Whether to open a cross-disciplinary call on a risk theme, and how to review proposals that span panels | Theme maps of contributing and missing fields; records of where review panels disagreed |
| Ministries responsible for science | Which systemic risk themes to name in national research priorities | Dialogue records with consensus and dissent kept apart; coverage gaps by discipline |
| National academies and learned societies | Whether to convene a joint study across disciplines, and on what terms | Earlier dialogue records, their participation profile and the open questions they leave |
| University research offices | How to recognise cross-disciplinary work in hiring and promotion | Comparative practice from other institutions and the assessment frameworks they use |
Research on interdisciplinary collaboration shows that shared vocabulary matters more than shared methods. Groups that spend time agreeing what terms mean, and that map how their models connect, produce more integrated work. Boundary objects, such as a shared scenario, dataset or diagram, give participants something concrete to work on together.
Dialogue fails when one discipline dominates, when participants defend positions rather than explore them, or when institutional participants are present only as audience. Power imbalances between well-resourced and less-resourced researchers, or between global and local knowledge, can silence important voices unless the process corrects for them.
No format suits every question. Exploratory dialogue on an emerging risk needs openness and time; dialogue on a contested finding needs careful balance and a clear record of each position.
Facilitated sessions with defined questions, balanced participation and recorded outcomes. Limits: depend heavily on facilitation quality.
Mapping what research exists on a question, across disciplines, before discussion. Limits: maps reflect what is published and indexed.
Formal methods for combining expert views, informed by probability and statistics. Limits: experts share blind spots.
Recording where and why participants disagree. Limits: some disagreements cannot be resolved by evidence.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.