Systemic risks

Risks  arising  from  the  breakdown  of  the  entire  system,  rather  than  the failure of individual parts. They are characterised by modest tipping points combining indirectly to produce large failures with cascading of interactions of physical and transition risks (contagion), as one loss triggers a chain of others, and with systems unable to recover equilibrium after a shock. An example is the loss of a keystone species, such as sea otters, which have a critical  role  in  ecosystem  community  structure.  When  sea  otters  were hunted to near extinction in the 1900s, the coastal ecosystems flipped and biomass production was greatly reduced.