Academic Journal Article

Global Risks of Infectious Disease Outbreaks and its Relation to Climate

The paper examines whether the aggregated effects of climate change and modes of climate variability affect the propensity for infectious disease outbreaks through an extreme value statistics approach. The analysis reveals that fatalities from outbreaks follow a power-law distribution, indicating that extreme events like the COVID-19 pandemic fall within expected statistical bounds. The authors find […]

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Interacting Tipping Elements Increase Risk of Climate Domino Effects under Global Warming

The authors use Boolean and dynamic network models to investigate how the the interactions of climate tipping elements (Greenland Ice Sheet, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), El Niño-Southern Oscillation, and Amazon rainforest) could produce domino effects (or tipping cascades) across other tipping elements. They find that tipping points in the Greenland

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Integrating Collapse Theories to Understand Socio-Ecological Systems Resilience

This longitudinal case study applies collapse theory to the Piura Basin of Peru, a region subject to extreme El Niño weather events, that has previously seen societal collapse in the ancient Moche civilization. By examining factors from the Robustness Framework such as centralized governance, system interconnectedness, and central elites, the researchers examined the interactions of

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Anatomy and Resilience of the Global Production Ecosystem

The authors argue that the worldwide production and distribution of food, fuel, and fibre has created a “global production ecosystem” subject to immense simplification, intensification, and control by humans attempting to maximize efficiency. The resulting system is homogenous, highly connected, and has weak feedbacks – “features [that] converge to yield high and predictable supplies of

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What are Cascading Disasters?

The authors argue that the world’s dependence on networks and critical infrastructure renders it increasingly vulnerable to “cascading disasters” in which “it is common for the secondary effects to be new sources of impact, which may be more devastating than the original trigger.” To help analyze the vulnerability pathways through which disaster cascades propagate, they

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Introduction: The European Union beyond the Polycrisis? Integration and Politicization in an Age of Shifting Cleavages

This article introduces a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy on Europe’s polycrisis, setting out the mechanisms of its “politics trap” and the strategies that have been utilized to try to deal with its constraints. It argues that “this ‘polycrisis’ is fracturing the European political system across multiple, simultaneous rifts, thereby creating a ‘polycleavage’.”

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Taking Strategic Initiative to Prevent and Defuse Major Risks

Melanie Hart, Jordan Link, and Ngor Luong of the Center for American Progress translate and discuss Chinese Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission Secretary-General Chen Yixin’s effort to explain President Xi Jinping’s “ten fundamental insights” on “preventing and resolving major risks”. Yixin considers black swan events and risk interactions, noting that “All categories of risk

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