The authors argue that the most effective way to build general resilience in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world is to foster “response diversity… a system’s variety of responses to disruptions of all kinds.” That entails maintaining a variety of ways to carry out key system process (ideally at different spatial and temporal scales) that […]
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This 18th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is based on a risk perceptions survey of 1200 experts on the likelihood, severity, and interconnections between 37 global risks. It finds that the biggest risk in the next two years is the cost of living crisis, and the biggest risk in the next
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The report highlights the distinctive harms for children and future generations of eight global trends that are part of the polycrisis: continued impacts of the pandemic, inflation, food insecurity, energy shortages, underinvestment in children, threats to democratic rights, international factionalism, and internet inequality.
Prospects for Children in the Polycrisis: A 2023 Global Outlook Read More »
Wolf argues that we cannot think about and address the many problems facing the world separately from one another. “The alternative of thinking about the interactions among [macroeconomics, finance, politics, social change, disease, and the environment] is also too hard. But sometimes, as now, it becomes inescapable… The point is that we need to analyse
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Noting that “This is not our first polycrisis”, the authors point out that actors in the Global South proposed a “New International Economic Order (NIEO)” to deal with the polycrisis of the 1970s by addressing food shortages, international debt, control over natural resources, and technology transfers. While the original NIEO failed, Progressive International has launched
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Geoff Mulgan argues that the United Kingdom suffers from an “imagination gap” that impedes its ability to navigate multiple crises, manifest in short-sighted policies and over-reliance on past solutions. He explains how politics, financing, and academia contribute to the gap and provides historical examples where imaginative experimentation helped solve crises. Mulgan concludes that “it is
Cameron Hill discusses a “range of proposals to reform the international development finance architecture in ways that might alleviate some of the worst effects of the multiple global shocks for low- and middle-income countries. This blog canvasses several of the more prominent proposals, including the dilemmas and trade-offs they raise.” He focuses on “debt, global
The ‘Polycrisis’ and Global Development Finance: Options and Dilemmas Read More »
Highlighting the connections between economic and non-economic shocks to the world, Adam Tooze proposes that “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the
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Ahead of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Lawrence H. Summers and Masood Ahmed implore these institutions to avoid a global economic downturn by addressing the polycrisis: “Challenges ranging from increased interest rates, climate change and an epically strong dollar, to food-supply shortages, high inflation and a still-prevalent pandemic all
IMF-World Bank Meetings are the Last Stop before a Coming Economic Storm Read More »
This Foresight Brief argues that conventional risk management frameworks cannot grapple with the growing number of systemic and existential risks generated by decades of globalization. Instead, these risks require more long-term thinking – “intentional consideration of what might happen in the future, the choices for influencing it and the consequences of those choices” (p. 10).
