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

June 5 2025

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 ...

June 1 2025

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 ...

May 28 2025

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 ...

May 26 2025

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 ...

May 20 2025

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 ...

May 13 2025

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 ...

May 7 2025

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 ...

May 1 2025

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 ...

April 24 2025

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

May 7 2025

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 ...

March 31 2025

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. ...

March 17 2025

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.

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