This paper offers the first cross-regional synthesis of stakeholder perspectives on multi-hazard risk drivers across Europe, providing empirically grounded insights into how hazard interactions, vulnerability dynamics and disaster risk reduction measures evolve over time. By integrating qualitative methods with multi-risk governance analysis, it promotes context-sensitive and actionable disaster risk knowledge. Its findings are highly relevant to the geosciences community working on risk modeling and hazard interactions and are also of great interest for practitioners, policymakers and media focusing on disaster risk governance, climate adaptation, and societal resilience.

This study identifies a potential instability in the global carbon cycle driven by feedbacks between climate, weathering, and ocean chemistry, suggesting abrupt shifts under extreme perturbations. Although the conditions required are severe, the findings reveal that Earth’s carbon system may have multiple stable states, with implications for climate tipping points. The work offers a crucial theoretical framework for understanding past and future carbon cycle disruptions, making it highly relevant to geoscientific and climate research.