In November 2025, an interdisciplinary group of vulnerability researchers met in Munich and identified three challenge-opportunity clusters: first, overcoming epistemological divides to enable meaningful interdisciplinary integration. Second, the interoperability of data, methods, and evidence can strengthen robustness and policy relevance. Third, vulnerability assessments must adopt fit-for-purpose levels of complexity that preserve local context while enabling cross-scalar translation. This backstory is a call-to-action to accelerate the transition of the field toward robust, policy-salient, and socially legitimate integrative and interdisciplinary research.