Are we Entering an Era of Concatenated Global Crises?

The authors argue that the world faces an increasing concatenation of crisis in time and space due to “the increased strength of global vs. local drivers of change, so that changes become increasingly synchronized”, and dense global connectivity, which enables crises to propagate and sometimes sees risk management efforts in one region to become crisis drivers in others. The article illustrates these mechanisms by examining the role of food and energy crises in the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8 “as an example of a globally coupled crisis in which origin and effects stemmed from far removed parts of the world and diverse sectors, and particularly affected the poor.”