Review article: How hazard-related disruptions become system-wide crises: event-level evidence on failure pathways and continuity functions, 1980–2025

Abstract. Cascading disasters are increasingly recognized as systemic escalation processes, yet comparative evidence on how initial hazard impacts are transformed into wider crises remains fragmented. Resilience dimensions clarify how system weaknesses interact with triggering hazards and determine whether disruption is absorbed, contained, or transmitted. Drawing on a PRISMA-guided search and targeted supplementary searches, this review synthesizes 43 event-level cascading-disaster cases from 1980 to 2025 to identify failure pathways linking hazards, failure mechanisms, and resilience dimensions. Each event was coded for initiating hazards and transformed hazards, propagation stages, escalation points, failure mechanisms, impacts, and resilience dimensions. Results show that technological and infrastructure failures were the most recurrent transformed hazards, while lifeline failure and secondary hazards formed the main escalation points. Cascade severity depended less on the length of the propagation chain than on which critical functions failed and how disruption propagated through dependent systems. Failure mechanisms clustered around monitoring/control, transport/access, coordination, lifeline services, exposure management, and health-system protection. The resilience crosswalk revealed an interdependence–redundancy gap in which connected systems lacked fallback capacity. These pathways produced persistent recovery burdens. The review proposes a continuity-function framework for cascade-risk reduction, emphasizing monitoring and control, lifeline services, access and logistics, emergency coordination, and equity-sensitive social protection.