This article examines the nature, causes, mechanisms, and impact of global systemic crises and their implications for global policymaking and governance.
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
Response Diversity as a Sustainability Strategy Read More »
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
Global Warming Overshoots Increase Risks of Climate Tipping Cascades in a Network Model Read More »
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
Why the impacts of climate change may make us less likely to reduce emissions Read More »
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
How Many Shocks Can the World Take? Read More »
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
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,
An Embarrassment of Changes: International Relations and the COVID-19 Pandemic Read More »
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
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
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
Global Risks of Infectious Disease Outbreaks and its Relation to Climate Read More »
