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Flattening the Curve on Societal Crisis: Lessons from History

The authors argue that today’s polycrisis, marked by climate change, inequality, and institutional fragility, echoes recurrent structural challenges seen throughout history. While most historical crises led to violence and collapse, a small number were successfully averted through transformative reforms. Drawing on these rare cases, the authors outline three critical policy lessons: reverse rising inequality to […]

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What the Global Risks Report 2026 Really Says About the Urgency of Environmental Threats

This article highlights how environmental risks remain among the most severe global threats in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026, yet their perceived urgency has shifted across time horizons. While short-term concerns are increasingly dominated by geopolitical fragmentation and misinformation, this shift does not reflect an easing of environmental threats, which are now

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How can Crisis-affected Countries Survive in the ‘New World Disorder’?

In this presentation, David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), highlights recommendations from the IRC’s 2026 Emergency Watchlist. He notes that near 240 million people are in humanitarian need, most concentrated in just 20 countries, and warns that today’s crises are increasingly internationalized, prolonged, and fueled by climate stress, conflict economies, and diplomatic

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Illuminating Limits: Educating for Postgrowth Futures in a Time of Polycrisis

The authors examine how environmental education is being reconfigured in an era of polycrisis, urging a move beyond reductive, growth-driven and technocratic paradigms. They advocate for a postgrowth educational approach that embraces ecological overshoot, social unravelling, and the systemic limits of industrial modernity. Drawing on heuristics rooted in complexity science, disaster studies, land economics, and

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How Can We Build Prosperity within Planetary Boundaries?

This session from the 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum explores how to achieve prosperity within planetary boundaries amid accelerating climate and ecological crises. With a keynote by Johan Rockström and contributions from panelists André Hoffmann, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, Sumant Sinha, Ramon Laguarta, and Andrew Forrest, the discussion highlights that seven of nine

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Immigration, War, Economic Collapse: Will the Global Order Change in 2026?

This article presents Fair Observers’s 2026 geopolitical outlook using a Social, Political, Economic, Religious, and Military framework. The authors argue that overlapping global stresses, immigration pressures, democratic dysfunction, economic fragility, and strategic rivalry, are accelerating institutional erosion. The analysis outlines key global risk dynamics, including the rise of far-right movements in Europe, increasing state fragility,

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We Are Living in a Time of Polycrisis. If You Feel Trapped – You’re Not Alone

The author explores the psychological toll of living through a polycrisis, characterised by the convergence of multiple, compounding global threats. Drawing on insights from psychologists and anthropologists, the article examines how radical uncertainty erodes individuals’ capacity to envision the future, resulting in paralysis, disconnection, and diminished long-term planning. The piece concludes by outlining strategies for

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Undemocratic States, Accelerated Disaster: Can We Reverse the Economic Incentives that Are Killing the Planet?

The author explores how authoritarianism, imperialism, and global capitalism converge to deepen the planetary polycrisis, accelerating ecological breakdown and democratic erosion. Arguing that prevailing economic incentives favour perpetual war and environmental destruction, Fernandes asserts that international institutions have failed to address the structural drivers of crisis. The article calls for a reorientation of economic and

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Funding Community Resilience in a Polycrisis: Exploring a Human Learning Systems (+)-Based Approach

The authors explore how the polycrisis requires a rethinking of funding mechanisms to build community resilience. They argue that traditional, risk-averse, outcome-based models are ill-suited to address interconnected crises, and propose the Human Learning Systems (+) model—an approach that enables funders and grantees to consider system-scale elements such as local economic drivers and political conditions,

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Global Risks Report 2026: Geopolitical and Economic Risks Rise in New Age of Competition

The Global Risks Report 2026 explores how a new competitive world order is reshaping global risks across domains. Over the next two years, geoeconomic confrontation is identified as the most severe risk, with economic and societal instability also rising sharply. Over a ten-year horizon, inequality emerges as the most interconnected long-term risk, while artificial intelligence shows the

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