Shock Tracker is a research project, a database and a collection of stories. The overall goal of Shock Tracker is to make communities, businesses and ecosystems more resilient and able to tackle the turbulent world we now live in.

To do this, we need:

1. 1. An understanding of what undesirable events could happen today and in the future.
   2. A diverse and nuanced understanding of the causes and impacts of these events.
   3. Information and tools to reduce the pressures causing events and mitigate the impacts of events once they happen.  

This is why Shock Tracker was founded, to provide the data and understanding needed to tackle today’s challenges. Shock Tracker is unique and complementary to other datasets out there in three main ways.

Firstly, Shock Tracker collects stories, or case studies. This means that every entry has a description of not just the event, but also its causes and impacts. This provides researchers with the opportunity to start detecting patterns between cases and start to understand what we can do to either avoid events entirely or at least mitigate the impacts.

Secondly, Shock Tracker takes a social-ecological perspective. This means that it collects a broad range of cases, where the impacts go beyond human lives lost or insurance losses to also include impacts on ecosystems and the many diverse ways in which human health and wellbeing can be affected. The social-ecological perspective also means that Shock Tracker asks contributors to reflect on how the interactions between humans and nature contributed to either creating the event or the extent of its impacts.

Lastly, Shock Tracker is a citizen science approach that collects stories and case studies from a range of different people across the world. By designing Shock Tracker in this way, we hope to overcome some of the biases of other databases and methods. We hope to begin to overcome the strong geographical bias that currently dominates many other datasets, where certain countries or regions especially in the Global South are underrepresented. We also hope to overcome the media bias, where events that usually get reported are only those that make it into news stories. This bias means data is usually only collected on bigger events leading to lives being lost or large economic implications. At Shock Tracker we want to acknowledge that an event can have been shocking and impactful to a local community or business without it making the news. As sustainability researchers we are also acutely aware that many of the sustainability problems we face today are not caused by single large events, but rather the accumulation of many smaller impacts. This is what we want to capture with Shock Tracker.

We hope that you join us in our ambition and help contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of our turbulent world.