Big Risks Mission Statement

What we do

Between 2015 and 2019, we strive to produce interdisciplinary cutting-edge research on the ways in which the public deals with neuralgic societal risks such as climate change, demographic change and state deficits in the 21st century ("big risks").

What is unique about our research group

• We work as a truly interdisciplinary group, spanning the range from financial mathematics, political science to philosophy.
• We work along the full breath of scientific methods, normatively, theoretically-formal and empirical.
• We are embedded in one of the four interdisciplinary research clusters of one of the biggest universities in Germany.

The Core Concept that we work with

We define risk as a real-world event that has negative consequences as interpreted by individuals. Two kinds of uncertainty matter for the ways in which societies deal with risks. On the one hand, the realisation of an event is associated with a known or unknown probability distribution that models uncertainty of the timing and the intensity of the realisation. On the other hand, the knowledge about the (nature of the) event and its probability distribution could be uncertain.

What we aim to accomplish

• Three annual keynote lectures from eminent scholars with the first being given on 02 March by Professor Sven-Ove Hansson from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
• A series of workshops to bring together early-career as well as established researchers who are interested in interdisciplinary risk research.
• Three joint publication projects in which we work as a full team on a series of interrelated aspects.
• Three PhD projects that are firmly rooted in the respective disciplines while at the same time being enriched by the interdisciplinary work of the group.

Big Risks Time Schedule and Milestones