Academic Journal Article

Navigating Polycrisis: Long-Run Socio-Cultural Factors Shape Response to Changing Climate

Societies throughout history have faced polycrises, but the outcomes range widely from collapse to positive adaptation. The authors have developed a Crisis Database of 150 past societal crises and find that three pressures make societies especially vulnerable to environmental stresses (and consequent polycrises) by impeding collective action: popular immiseration, elite overproduction and conflict, and state […]

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Global Warming Overshoots Increase Risks of Climate Tipping Cascades in a Network Model

The research examines the risk of climate tipping under various temperature overshoot scenarios using a simplified network model. It shows that temporary overshoots can increase the tipping risks up to 72% compared with non-overshoot scenarios. It suggests that to avoid high-end climate risks, low-temperature overshoots and stabilization of long-term temperatures at or below current levels

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Why the impacts of climate change may make us less likely to reduce emissions

While increased climate warming may motivate ambitious actions that remediate the climate crisis, Millward-Hopkins proposes that it may have the opposite effect. He argues that the indirect impacts of warming, such as widening socioeconomic inequalities, increased migration, and heightened risk of conflict, interact with key drivers of authoritarian populism in ways that may foster resistance

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How Many Shocks Can the World Take?

Stephen M. Walt considers a number of global shocks that have all happened in close temporal proximity to one another and are “overwhelming our collective ability to respond”: the breakup of the Soviet empire, China’s rise, 9/11 and the global war on terror, the 2008 financial meltdown, the Arab Spring, the global refugee crisis, the

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Global Food Insecurity and Famine from Reduced Crop, Marine Fishery and Livestock Production due to Climate Disruption from Nuclear War Soot Injection

The authors examine the global food consequences of nuclear war on food security. Through six scenarios of stratospheric soot injection resulting from nuclear detonations, and using integrated climate, crop, and fishery models, they estimate post-war national food calorie availability after the depletion of stored food. The findings reveal that soot injections exceeding 5 Tg would cause

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An Embarrassment of Changes: International Relations and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mathew Davies and Christopher Hobson argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is part of an ongoing polycrisis that requires significant changes to the ways in which the discipline of International Relations understands the world. They propose that “Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes [that] closely interact with one another,

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Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters

Reviewing international cooperation on social and environmental change, and particularly the failure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, Jem Bendell argues that the Sustainable Development framework is unable to address the increasing crises and disasters faced by the world today. As an alternative, he proposes an upgraded form of Disaster Risk Management that is detached

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Decline and Fall, Growth and Spread, or Resilience? Approaches to Studying How and Why Societies Change

Daniel Hoyer examines qualitative, case study, complex system, and societal dynamics approaches to explain “historical precedents of collapse, growth, and resilience.” He explains drawbacks to each method, and stresses “the importance of developing formal (especially mathematically articulated) mechanistic theory, as only by explicating what we think drives societal outcomes in a structured, formal way can

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