Infrastructure failure cascades quintuple risk of storm and flood-induced service disruptions across the globe

Society is dependent on critical infrastructure that provides basic services such as healthcare, mobility, communications, and power. Severe weather can damage these vital infrastructure assets, disrupting services. Such disruptions can further escalate due to system interdependencies. Although research increasingly evaluates physical risks to infrastructure assets, knowledge on service disruption risks from natural hazard-induced failure cascades across networked infrastructure systems remains limited. Here, we couple an open-source risk model with a complex network-based infrastructure module to simulate spatially explicit service disruptions from 700 historic floods and tropical cyclones in 30 countries. We find that failure cascades account for 64–89% of service disruptions, which also spread beyond the hazard footprint in nearly 3 out of 4 events. Disruption-affected population surpasses estimates of physically affected by up to ten-fold. We demonstrate that knowledge of the effect of infrastructure network designs, population distribution, wealth, and hazard characteristics can help prioritize systemic adaptation strategies over asset-focused ones.