In the Cascading Risks Study, author Trond Undheim seeks to create five scenarios (Climate cataclysm by 2075; World war by 2075; Growth and collapse by 2075; Runaway AI by 2075; and Synthetic biology released in the wild by 2075 ) with which to spur deeper conversation about the existential risks to humanity and how they […]
Scenarios 2075: The Cascading Risks Study Read More »
The authors argue that polycrises “are associated with enormous psychological stress, especially for vulnerable groups”, in part because they impair social interaction. The resulting loneliness then affects people’s behaviors within a polycrisis by: increasing mental and physical morbidity and mortality, increasing negative cognitive bias, decreasing social engagement, lowering voter turnout, and by bringing other latent
Loneliness in Times of Global Polycrises Read More »
The authors argue that inadequate national and global level data prevent us from understanding the complex interactions of the polycrisis and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. They propose that applied systems thinking can address this gap by helping to hypothesize, model, visualize, and test system properties, especially if it uses participatory processes that “assist stakeholders
Roman Krznaric explores the conditions in which crises lead to transformative societal change. He finds that transformative responses are most common in conditions of war, disaster, revolution, and disruption. The latter refers to “a moment of system instability that provides opportunities for rapid transformation” which is created by the “disruption nexus” of crisis events (typically
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Motivated by a desire to strengthen the social relevance of geography in the quest for global sustainability, Matlovic and Matlovicova discuss how the subdisciplines of geography and the rich heritage they present, as well as other related disciplines, can be integrated into the geographical study of polycrisis in the Anthropocene epoch. The authors identify polycrisis
Eric Helleiner defines polycrisis as “a cluster of distinct crises that interact in ways that they and/or their effects tend to reinforce each other” and argues that economic globalization is experiencing a polycrisis made up of five constituent crises: the deepening trade war between the United States and China; the move towards national self-sufficiency in
Economic Globalization’s Polycrisis Read More »
The authors argue that the current body of research into societal crises—defined here as “periods of turmoil and destabilization in socio-cultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by varying amounts of violence and sometimes significant changes in social structure”—concentrates on a narrow selection of historical examples. Addressing this, the authors compile a database of
The authors examine domestic policymaking processes amidst polycrisis by tracing the Canadian government’s development of its Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) during the Covid-19 pandemic. They argue that the process embodied three key best practices for national-level policy design in a crisis—policy integration, learning, and agility—and show how these elements evade capture by the polycrisis
This commentary introduces “Polycrisis in the Anthropocene,” a special issue of Global Sustainability journal. It elaborates upon three major contributions of the issue’s lead article, “Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement,” and it explores three key debates surrounding the polycrisis concept: Are we in a polycrisis, at risk of a polycrisis, or neither?
Polycrisis in the Anthropocene: An Invitation to Contributions and Debates Read More »
The authors translate polycrisis from a loose concept into a research agenda by providing the concept with a substantive definition, highlighting its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and developing a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world’s crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or
Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement Read More »
