When One Disaster Triggers Another: How Cascading Climate Risks Are Breaking North American Cities

North American cities are confronting a class of climate threat that defies the traditional playbook of disaster management. A new review published in Discover Cities argues that the most damaging urban climate impacts rarely stem from a single hazard acting alone. Instead, extreme heat, drought, flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, wildfire smoke, and sea-level rise interact with aging infrastructure, uneven urbanization, social vulnerability, and fragmented governance in ways that can amplify disruption far beyond the initial shock. Simone Lucatello of Instituto Mora-SECIHTI in Mexico City and Blás Pérez Henríquez of Stanford University systematically examined urban cases across Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and their conclusion is stark: cities that plan for hazards one at a time are systematically underestimating the crises they will actually face.

The conceptual heart of the study lies in distinguishing two related but distinct phenomena. Compound risks emerge when multiple climatic drivers, hazards, or vulnerabilities interact to produce impacts greater than any factor alone would suggest, whether simultaneously, as when heat and drought strike together, or sequentially, as when prolonged drought is followed by intense rainfall on desiccated, impermeable ground. Cascading risks describe something different: the propagation of an initial shock through interconnected systems, so that a meteorological event becomes a crisis of electricity, water, telecommunications, housing, mobility, and public health. A heatwave strains the electricity grid at precisely the moment demand for cooling peaks; a power outage then disables water pumping, refrigeration, traffic control, and hospital systems. The authors emphasize that these terms are not synonyms, and that conflating them obscures the specific pathways through which urban crises unfold.

Underpinning the analysis is the idea that cities are not passive recipients of hazards but dense socio-technical systems in which physical infrastructure, economic activity, ecological conditions, social vulnerability, and institutional decision-making are deeply intertwined. Electricity, water supply, drainage, transport, telecommunications, food distribution, and emergency response are so interdependent that a disruption in one domain can propagate across the others, transforming a localized event into a systemic urban crisis. Crucially, the authors note, infrastructure is not merely technical. It is shaped by political choices, investment patterns, maintenance gaps, institutional fragmentation, and unequal territorial development, which means that resilience is as much a governance, finance, and equity challenge as an engineering one.

To build the evidence base, the researchers conducted a targeted comparative scoping review combined with qualitative policy-document analysis, covering literature published primarily between January 2020 and June 2026. Searches in Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, supplemented by policy repositories and conducted in both English and Spanish, yielded a final corpus of 81 sources: 54 academic publications and 27 policy, governmental, or institutional documents. Each source was coded across eight dimensions, including hazard profile, compound interaction, cascading pathway, social amplification, governance challenge, funding challenge, and policy response. The urban cases spanned New Orleans and Los Angeles in the United States; Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, Calgary, and Edmonton in Canada; and Mexico City, Monterrey, Acapulco, and Veracruz–Boca del Río in Mexico, selected to capture contrasting combinations of coastal storms, heat, drought, flooding, sea-level rise, and institutional capacity.

The United States cases reveal the tension between strong subnational innovation and unstable federal climate policy. New Orleans illustrates how a coastal hazard becomes a systemic urban crisis: Hurricane Katrina combined storm surge and flooding with levee failure, electricity and communications disruption, constrained emergency access, housing loss, prolonged displacement, and racialized recovery outcomes. The city now possesses a relatively mature hazard-mitigation architecture linking its Hazard Mitigation Office, Office of Sustainability, NOLA Ready, and the Sewerage and Water Board, yet institutional coordination and equitable implementation remain continuing challenges. Los Angeles, meanwhile, faces interacting heat, drought, wildfire and smoke, flooding, and electricity stress, and benefits from California’s adaptation strategy and novel financing mechanisms such as climate-resilience districts under Senate Bill 852. But responsibility for heat, wildfire, water, drainage, energy, and housing remains divided among agencies, and the availability of state and federal funds varies across programs and political cycles.

Canada presents a different profile: a relatively advanced national adaptation framework paired with a persistent urban implementation gap. The National Adaptation Strategy establishes shared goals for disaster resilience, health, nature, infrastructure, and the economy, while provinces retain major responsibilities for municipalities, land use, and emergency management. Canada’s National Issues Report concludes that local governments are moving from planning toward implementation, but that action is not keeping pace with present and projected risks. Toronto’s climate-risk assessment connects heat, flooding, wildfire smoke, infrastructure, and vulnerable populations; Vancouver’s adaptation strategy integrates sea-level rise and coastal exposure; Halifax, Calgary, and Edmonton each maintain formal strategies. The recurring deficit, the review finds, is not the absence of plans but the incomplete integration of municipal instruments with infrastructure ownership, provincial authority, long-term finance, Indigenous governance, and operational performance indicators.

Mexico’s cases expose how cascading risks intensify under uneven urbanization, water insecurity, infrastructure deficits, informality, and fragmented metropolitan governance. In the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, drought and flooding are interconnected rather than opposing risks: low reservoir levels in the Cutzamala system, groundwater depletion, subsidence, leakage, and unequal household access can convert climatic drought into a wider service and governance crisis, while intense rainfall overwhelms drainage and mobility systems. Monterrey’s 2022 water crisis combined prolonged drought, reservoir depletion, infrastructure deficiencies, and unequal access. Acapulco offers perhaps the most dramatic illustration: Hurricane Otis in 2023, a rapidly intensifying cyclone, damaged housing, hotels, roads, electricity, water, telecommunications, and livelihoods, turning a single storm into an urban economic and social crisis. The Veracruz–Boca del Río conurbation demonstrates horizontal fragmentation, where the ecological and infrastructure system is metropolitan but planning authority and budgets remain divided between two municipalities and the state.

From the cross-case comparison, the authors distill three types of governance deficit. A vertical deficit occurs when national or state commitments are not matched by predictable municipal finance, authority, or implementation support, a pattern visible in Canadian municipal dependence on federal programs, U.S. dependence on shifting federal funding, and Mexican municipal dependence on state institutions. A horizontal deficit arises when sectoral agencies or adjacent municipalities manage interconnected systems separately, as in Los Angeles infrastructure governance, Mexico City’s metropolitan water system, and Veracruz–Boca del Río. An operational deficit emerges when plans or risk atlases identify hazards but remain weakly connected to budgets, maintenance, enforcement, monitoring, or social protection, with Acapulco cited as a clear example. A study of twenty North American city governments cited in the review similarly found that resilience governance frequently remains divided across agencies and sectors even when climate risks are cross-sectoral.

The review also highlights a subtler danger: strategies intended to enhance resilience to one event may inadvertently reduce resilience to another concurrent hazard. Prospective analysis, infrastructure stress testing, and scenario planning can help identify and minimize such unintended consequences, particularly as research projects increases in the frequency and duration of compound dry-hot extremes across major U.S. cities under the combined effects of climate change and urban development. Community-centered approaches and the co-design of problem-solving processes can strengthen adaptation programs, while interagency coordination and transdisciplinary research are needed to address effects that move across sectors and reduce siloed management. The authors caution that their findings should be interpreted as an analytically structured synthesis rather than a statistical ranking of urban performance, given the targeted nature of the review and the uneven evidence base across countries.

The ultimate message is a call to move from isolated adaptation measures toward integrated risk governance. Cities are exposed not only to individual hazards but to hazards that interact with one another and with the infrastructure, social, and governance systems that sustain urban life. A heatwave can become an energy and public-health crisis; a drought can become a water, economic, and governance crisis; a hurricane can become a housing, telecommunications, transport, energy, and social-protection crisis. Without prospective scenario planning, infrastructure stress testing, stable resilience financing, intersectoral metropolitan coordination, and equity-centered infrastructure planning, the authors warn, cities may remain trapped in reactive cycles of emergency response and reconstruction rather than achieving sustained risk reduction. The future of urban resilience, the review suggests, will depend on whether cities can govern the relationships among infrastructure, inequality, finance, and climate uncertainty in coordinated and equitable ways.

Subject of Research: Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience in North American cities

Article Title: Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America

Article References: Lucatello, S., & Henríquez, B. P. (2026). Compound and cascading climate risks in urban infrastructure governance and resilience across North America. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 201. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00374-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00374-1

Keywords: compound climate risk, cascading failures, urban resilience, critical infrastructure, climate adaptation, governance, North America, flooding, extreme heat, drought, hurricanes, social vulnerability