Most regional climate plans are written to manage risk within existing systems. They categorise hazards, score impacts, and propose adaptations — all within institutional and sectoral boundaries. What they rarely do is ask the harder question: what happens when those risks cascade across systems simultaneously? When a flood doesn’t just damage roads, but overwhelms a housing list, depletes a council budget, spikes food prices, and erodes public trust — all at once?
That is the question this toolkit is designed to help you answer for your bioregion.
Developed by Bioregioning Tayside and Dark Matter Labs, the Bioregional Systemic Risk Analysis Toolkit is a free, step-by-step prompt guide for bioregional teams, place-based organisations, and regional planners who want to produce a deeper kind of risk analysis — one grounded in the existing plans and assessments for their region, but reassembled through a systemic lens that those plans, written within institutional silos, cannot produce on their own.
How it works
The toolkit gives you ten structured prompts to run in sequence with an AI tool of your choice. You begin by uploading the key planning documents you already have — climate assessments, local outcome improvement plans, health reports, food strategies, and whatever else exists for your region. The prompts then guide you and the AI through three stages of analysis:
Stage 1 grounds the AI in your region’s specific geography, governance, and pressures, and establishes the theoretical framework — drawn from Indy Johar’s writing on systemic breakdown and Total Value at Risk.
Stage 2 builds the analysis itself: mapping seven interlocking risk layers and the cascade chains between them; identifying the reinforcing feedback loops that progressively weaken a region’s adaptive capacity; and conducting a deep-dive analysis of a critical domain such as food, energy, water, or care as an example of how systemic breakdown becomes visible in everyday life.
Stage 3 synthesises everything into a draft report, structured around the concept of a Continuity Field — a map of the interdependent conditions that must remain viable for your region to retain its ability to adapt — and a leadership proposition for your organisation’s potential role as a steward of bioregional intelligence.
What you get
By the end of the process, you will have a full draft systemic risk and continuity analysis for your bioregion, including a cascade risk map, feedback loop diagram, domain-specific analysis, Total Value at Risk assessment, continuity indicators, and a leadership proposition. The toolkit also includes guidance on how to convert the AI’s prose output into a designed report document.
The whole process takes between half a day and two days, depending on how many documents you have and how deeply you want to explore individual domains.
Who it is for
The toolkit is designed for teams working on bioregional regeneration, place-based climate adaptation, or regional governance reform — particularly those who feel that existing risk frameworks are not capturing the full picture of what their region faces. It does not require technical expertise in systems thinking or risk modelling. It requires good regional documents, a capable AI tool, and the willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about what is really at risk.
The toolkit was developed from the methodology used to produce the analysis for the Tay Bioregion. Read that report to see what the output can look like — and then try it for your region.