Breaking down silos: Navigating the intersection of environmental and social risks for investors

This resource from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) can help you to better understand how environmental and social factors are increasingly interacting to drive financially material impacts, and how these interlinkages lead to risks that propagate across value chains and industrial, geographic, and socioeconomic systems. It explains how risk assessment frameworks often still treat environmental and social factors in isolation, underestimating their combined, cumulative financial impacts. It explains the financial materiality of intersecting environmental and social risks, highlighting how interlinkages can result in cascading risks, feedback loops, and synchronous failures that drive greater losses, reduced ability to adapt, and increased portfolio volatility. It then explains the implications of intersecting risks on portfolios and the benefits of an integrated risk lens. The report also introduces a conceptual framework that explains how environmental and social risks compound across three dimensions: geographic scale (local to global transmission of risk), value chain complexities (how disruptions propagate through supply chains) and socio-demographic vulnerabilities (how inequalities shape exposure, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity). This resource will be especially beneficial for sustainability and risk professionals.