Academic Journal Article

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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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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