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
Our polycrisis demands a radically new approach to risk management
Ruth Richardson, the Executive Director of the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment, argues that the "escalating global polycrisis demands an urgent and transformative shift in how we assess, anticipate, and mitigate systemic risks." She then ...
FuturePod Interview with Drs. Megan Shipman and Michael Lawrence
In this episode of FuturePod, host Dr. Peter Hayward speaks with Drs. Megan Shipman and Michael Lawrence of the Cascade Institute about the current global polycrisis, and their recently published Positive Pathways report and accompanying ...
Positive Pathways report
This Cascade Institute report explores how to translate an understanding of polycrises into actionable strategies to alleviate them. It suggests ways in which polycrisis analysis can build on existing approaches to systemic change to help ...
Causal Loop Diagrams handbook
In this handbook, Cascade Institute Polycrisis Fellow Michael Lawrence explains how to read and draw a causal loop diagrams (CLD)–a systems mapping technique that helps us to think through our mental model of a system, ...
The Disruption Nexus
Roman Krznaric explores the conditions in which crises lead to transformative societal change. He finds that transformative responses are most common in conditions of war, disaster, revolution, and disruption. The latter refers to "a moment ...
Libraries in Response Session 103: “Polycrisis R Us!”
Libraries in Response, produced by the Gigabit Libraries Network, is a webinar series focusing on how libraries are responding to health, social, economic, political, and climate crises. In this episode, Drs. Michael Lawrence and Megan ...
SONAR 2024: New Emerging Risk Insights
The Swiss Re Institute, the research arm of Swiss Re Reinsurance, harnesses their risk knowledge in re/insurance to produce data driven research with partner organizations, shared via publications such as SONAR. SONAR is an annual ...
Polycrisis in the Anthropocene as a Key Research Agenda for Geography: Ontological Delineation and the Shift to a Postdisciplinary Approach
Motivated by a desire to strengthen the social relevance of geography in the quest for global sustainability, Matlovic and Matlovicova discuss how the subdisciplines of geography and the rich heritage they present, as well as ...
The Polycrisis: Behind The Buzzword
This article discusses the emergence of the word ‘polycrisis’ in 2023, noting its rise to prominence at the 53rd World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, and seeks to underscore the gravity behind it. Larchman provides a ...
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.