Multiple global crises are worsening one another to produce what many policymakers, scholars, and commentators call a “polycrisis.” This website is a hub that helps this emerging community better understand and address the intersecting crises affecting humanity.
LATEST RESOURCES
New Responses to Systemic Risks: An Exploration 2025–2045
This report presents the results of a futures exercise led by ASRA to explore novel responses to escalating systemic risks between 2025 and 2045. Using the ParEvo method, a group of experts collaboratively developed storylines ...
Systemic Management Practices—Enabling Local Governments to Adapt in Response to Complexity
The authors explore the impact of accelerating change and increasingly complex global and local challenges on the city as a complex socio-ecological service ecosystem (SES) and its capacity to ensure sustainability or ecosystem health. Drawing ...
Polycrisis and Systemic Risk: Assessment, Governance, and Communication
In this article Huan Liu and Ortwin Renn examine the concepts of polycrisis and systemic risk. They outline key commonalities and differences and develop a joint understanding to inform risk assessment, governance, and communication. The ...
Critical Responses to Global Systemic Risk in an Era of Polycrisis
In this paper, Ruth Richardson argues that the global polycrisis demands a transformative shift in how systemic risks are assessed and addressed. Traditional, siloed approaches to risk management are no longer sufficient to confront the ...
Polycrisis Patterns: Applying System Archetypes to Crisis Interactions
This paper illustrates the potential of systems thinking by applying system archetypes to advance the conceptual understanding of the polycrisis. It explores three archetypes adapted to the study of polycrises: Converging Constraints (based on the ...
Towards the Governance of Global Systemic Risk: Reforming the Summit of the Future
This paper examines the United Nations’ 2024 Summit of the Future and its Pact for the Future, suggesting that while the Pact addresses key global challenges, it does not fully account for the systemic nature ...
Polycrisis in the Anthropocene – A Global Sustainability Webinar
One year after the call for papers for the Polycrisis in the Anthropocene special issue, 13 articles have been published, with more contributions forthcoming. This webinar features five authors from the first set of papers ...
Public Administration in an Age of Polycrises: Multi-nodal Governance Approaches in Some South East Asian Countries
In this chapter, the authors explore how public administration can effectively respond to the contemporary polycrisis. Using a multi-nodal governance framework, the chapter examines how selected Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand ...
From Polycrisis to Metacrisis: a short introduction
The authors explore the relationship between polycrisis and metacrisis, proposing a three-layer logic model to explain their connection. While polycrisis refers to the entanglement of interconnected global crises that intensify one another, metacrisis points to ...
NEW TO POLYCRISIS.ORG
Polycrisis in the Anthropocene – A Global Sustainability Webinar
One year after the call for papers for the Polycrisis in the Anthropocene special issue, 13 articles have been published, with more contributions forthcoming. This webinar features five authors from the first set of papers ...
How Do Crises Spread? The Polycrisis and Crisis Transmission
Malte Brosig examines the conditions under which crises may transmit across systems, presenting a conceptual analysis that draws on a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, including neofunctionalism, rational choice, complexity theory, assemblage theory, and epidemiology. ...
What Comes After the Polycrisis?
In this article, Erik Assadourian explores how interventions during the polycrisis can be designed to be most effective in fostering a better post-polycrisis future, while also strengthening society’s ability to respond in the present. He ...
Try our guided tour of essential themes in the polycrisis discussion and key texts in the Polycrisis Resource Library.
This map charts the emerging community of scholars and practitioners working on polycrisis and closely related topics.