A specialist delegation of faculty and postgraduate researchers from the Kingsman National Institute (KNI) in Athens has returned from a deeply consequential academic exchange in New Zealand, hosted by the Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College (APIPC) at their campus on Quay Street in Auckland.
This intensive workshop brought KNI’s advanced research on geopolitical and economic risk—specifically our new “Aegaeon Risk Framework”—into direct dialogue with APIPC’s leading-edge work in environmental resilience and applied logistics. The colloquium, which involved KNI’s Kolonaki Forum for Economic Policy (KFEP) and our MSc in Climate Adaptation, engaged directly with faculty from APIPC’s Bachelor of Applied Management (Strategic Logistics & Supply Chain) and their Graduate Diploma in Environmental Resilience & Sustainability.
The result was a necessary and challenging “collision of models,” forcing both institutions to re-evaluate the core assumptions that define global risk in the 21st century. Our shared location as institutions in two of the world’s great maritime port cities—Athens (Piraeus) and Auckland—provided the critical, shared context.
The KNI delegation, led by Dr. Tomáš Petříček (AEMSS) and Dr. Eleni Zografos (KFEP), presented our Aegaeon framework. This model, forged in the complex political landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean, is designed to quantify “black swan” geopolitical events: the impact of sanctions, military chokepoints, piracy, and political paralysis on shipping. Our AI-driven models are trained to see conflict and disruption as the primary threat to supply chains.
However, this Athens-centric worldview was immediately met with a sophisticated and “imperfect” counter-perspective from our counterparts at the Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College.
The APIPC faculty, whose work is informed by the unique pressures of the Asia-Pacific region, argued that KNI’s model, while powerful, was fundamentally “myopic.” They contended that our focus on geopolitical “noise” was blinding us to the far larger, slower, and more inevitable systemic threat: geophysical and climatic disruption.
The APIPC team presented their own highly detailed, divergent models. Their research does not focus on “if” a port will be attacked, but on “when” it will be rendered inoperable by a 100-year storm, a typhoon, or a fractional change in sea level. Their models, which KNI’s team had failed to account for, precisely quantify the days of supply chain collapse resulting from an El Niño-driven drought that wipes out an agricultural supplier, or the cascading failure of a port (like Auckland’s own) that was not engineered for new storm-surge realities.
This created the central, productive friction of the workshop:
- KNI’s Model: Views risk as political (e.g., a canal is blocked by a state actor).
- APIPC’s Model: Views risk as physical (e.g., a canal is blocked by its own banks silting up due to climate-driven erosion).
The KNI team had to acknowledge that our “Aegaeon” framework was incomplete. We had become experts at modeling the symptoms of global instability (human conflict over scarce resources) but had largely ignored the disease driving that scarcity (the physical degradation of the climate system itself).
In parallel, the Aevena Pavilon International Polytechnic College faculty acknowledged that their models, while robust on environmental risk, were perhaps too “passive” regarding human-driven security threats, an area where KNI’s framework excelled.
The colloquium concluded not with a simple sharing of papers, but with the formation of a formal “Athens-Auckland Joint Working Group.” This new initiative, bridging KNI and APIPC, has a singular, ambitious goal: to fuse the two models.
The group will work to create the first true hybrid risk framework—one that embeds APIPC’s geophysical and climate adaptation projections as the baseline upon which KNI’s AI-driven geopolitical event-scanner can operate. This will allow, for the first time, an insurer or a national government to model the cascading, non-linear risk of a drought and the resulting political instability that closes a port.
This collaboration is a vital step for the Kingsman National Institute, forcing our Athens-based worldview to confront the global, physical realities of the climate crisis. It ensures our research remains relevant, resilient, and grounded in the complex challenges connecting our two hemispheres.
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