Learning resource Archives

Limiting Overshoot – Navigating Exceedance of 1.5°C and Pathways Towards Return

UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot report examines global warming’s exceedance of 1.5°C, which is now expected across central estimates, and argues that the magnitude and duration of this overshoot are not predetermined. The report finds that every additional fraction of a degree and year above 1.5°C increases exposure to climate hazards and the likelihood of irreversible loss.

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The Polycrisis and Emerging-Market Resilience: Climate Shocks, Financial Volatility, and Geopolitical Fragmentation as Simultaneous Stressors – Building Adaptive Macroeconomic Frameworks for Compounding Risks

This report examines how climate shocks, financial volatility, sovereign debt pressures, and geopolitical fragmentation interact to create compounding macroeconomic risks for emerging and developing economies. It argues that these interconnected stressors can produce non-linear effects, including capital flight, currency depreciation, food and energy inflation, shrinking fiscal space, and sovereign debt distress, making conventional approaches designed

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Polycrisis Exploration Workshop

This guidance document provides detailed instructions on how to run the Joint Research Centre’s Polycrisis Exploration Workshop and use the resulting insights in policymaking. Based on the foresight study Risks on the Horizon, the workshop is designed to facilitate strategic conversations about increasingly interconnected risks, disasters, and potential polycrises. It guides participants through three activities:

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World Economic Forum: Time to Retire “Polycrisis” for “Polytunity”

This edited conversation from the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Summer Davos examines Yuen Yuen Ang’s proposal to reframe “polycrisis” as “polytunity”, emphasising the opportunities for transformation that can emerge when multiple global systems experience disruption simultaneously. Yuen Yuen Ang argues that the concept of polycrisis can encourage a fear-driven and paralysing view of interconnected threats,

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Leaders Should Plan for Colliding Risks, Not Isolated Crises. Here’s Why

This article argues that businesses must move beyond managing individual threats and prepare for the cascading, compounding, and colliding effects of interconnected global risks. It highlights geopolitics, climate change, and artificial intelligence as systemic risk multipliers that can interact through concentrated supply chains, critical infrastructure, energy systems, and digital networks, while traditional shock absorbers such

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Global Catastrophic Risk from Lower Magnitude Volcanic Eruptions

The authors argue that moderate volcanic eruptions might have cascading, catastrophic effects. They identify seven global “pinch points” where volcanic hazards intersect with concentrated systems such as shipping routes, air transportation, submarine communication cables, trade networks, and key industries, creating pathways for local disruptions to cascade through the global economy. The authors argue that globalisation

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Reforming Global Health for an Age of Mistrust, Fragmentation and Overlapping Crises

The authors argue that global health architecture must be reformed to respond more effectively to an era of polycrisis. They propose three interlinked priorities: rebalancing power by strengthening country ownership, regional institutions, and the participation of affected communities; reinforcing health systems by moving beyond fragmented, disease-specific approaches and building capacity to address interconnected and emerging

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Africa’s Greater Horn Region Is Facing a Looming Polycrisis Fueled by Conflict, Prices, Climate and Disease

This article argues that the Greater Horn of Africa is facing a looming polycrisis driven by the interaction of climate extremes, violent conflict, disease outbreaks, and rising food and fertiliser prices, compounded by weakening humanitarian capacity. The authors contend that these overlapping shocks are mutually reinforcing rather than additive, increasing the risk of famine, displacement,

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Polycrisis and Regeneration: Latin America Facing the Opportunity to Build New Futures

This article argues that Latin America occupies a distinctive but tension-filled position in the global polycrisis, holding ecologically strategic territories such as the Amazon, the Andean systems, and major wetlands while sustaining economies heavily dependent on extractive models that pressure those same systems. The author contends that climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and pollution

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