In a rapidly changing world, what is today an unprecedented extreme may soon become the norm. As a result, extreme‐related disasters are expected to become more frequent and intense. This will have widespread socio‐economic consequences and affect the ability of different societal groups to recover from and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Therefore, there is the need to decipher the relation between genesis of unprecedented events, accumulation and distribution of risk, and recovery trajectories across different societal groups. Here, we develop an analytical approach to unravel the complexity of future extremes and multiscalar societal responses—from households to national governments and from immediate impacts to longer term recovery. This requires creating new forms of knowledge that integrate analyses of the past—that is, structural causes and political processes of risk accumulation and differentiated recovery trajectories—with plausible scenarios of future environmental extremes grounded in the event‐specific literature. We specifically seek to combine the physical characteristics of the extremes with examinations of how culture, politics, power, and policy visions shape societal responses to unprecedented events, and interpret the events as social‐environmental extremes. This new approach, at the nexus between social and natural sciences, has the concrete advantage of providing an impact‐focused vision of future social‐environmental risks, beyond what is achievable within conventional disciplinary boundaries. In this paper, we focus on extreme flooding events and the societal responses they elicit. However, our approach is flexible and applicable to a wide range of extreme events. We see it as the first building block of a new field of research, allowing for novel and integrated theoretical explanations and forecasting of social‐environmental extremes.

中文翻译：

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人类应对前所未有的社会环境极端事件的方案

在瞬息万变的世界中，今天前所未有的极端情况可能很快就会成为常态。结果，与极端有关的灾难预计将变得更加频繁和严重。这将产生广泛的社会经济后果，并影响不同社会群体从迅速变化的环境条件中恢复和适应的能力。因此，需要破译史无前例的事件的发生，风险的积累和分布以及不同社会群体之间的恢复轨迹之间的关系。在这里，我们开发了一种分析方法来揭示未来极端事件和多尺度社会反应的复杂性-从家庭到国家政府，从直接影响到长期复苏。这就要求创建新的知识形式，以整合过去的分析，也就是说，风险累积和差异化恢复轨迹的结构性原因和政治过程-特定事件的文献中都提出了未来环境极端事件的可能情景。我们专门寻求将极端现象的物理特征与文化，政治，权力和政策愿景如何塑造社会对前所未有的事件的反应相结合，并将这些事件解释为：社会环境极端情况。这种新方法处于社会科学与自然科学之间的联系中，其具体优势是可以提供超越常规学科范围内可以实现的，以影响为重点的对未来社会环境风险的愿景。在本文中，我们关注极端洪水事件及其引发的社会反应。但是，我们的方法很灵活，适用于各种极端事件。我们将其视为新研究领域的第一个基石，它允许进行新颖而综合的理论解释以及对社会环境极端事件的预测。