Both Adaptive and Transformative Capacities are Necessary to Navigate Global Polycrisis

The authors assess the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities for navigating the global polycrisis. Through a rapid assessment of their potential for addressing the 14 Anthropocene traps, they find that while 10 of 14 traps challenge 17 of 23 resilience capacities, 10 capacities hold general potential to prevent trap formation and progress, with transformative and adaptive capacities complementing each other in the types of traps they address. The authors propose five unifying processes that can serve as an organizing framework for the consideration of other sustainability and crisis capacities: innovation and selection, inheritance and transmission, learning and knowledge, cooperation, and stability, robustness, and plasticity.