This article develops a political economy framework to analyse multiple, overlapping global crises, including crises of capitalism, labour, gender, race, and ecology. Drawing on the philosophy of internal relations and a historical materialist approach, the author argues that these crises are not separate but internally related, arising from the structural dynamics of capitalist accumulation, which […]
The authors argue that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a major One Health issue, driven by a range of accelerators, including emerging climate and social challenges. In the context of a worsening polycrisis, they call for an ecosystem-centered governance agenda based on four pillars: identifying local environmental drivers, mapping transmission pathways, reducing AMR stability and selection
The authors examine how environmental education is being reconfigured in an era of polycrisis, urging a move beyond reductive, growth-driven and technocratic paradigms. They advocate for a postgrowth educational approach that embraces ecological overshoot, social unravelling, and the systemic limits of industrial modernity. Drawing on heuristics rooted in complexity science, disaster studies, land economics, and
Illuminating Limits: Educating for Postgrowth Futures in a Time of Polycrisis Read More »
The authors explore how the polycrisis requires a rethinking of funding mechanisms to build community resilience. They argue that traditional, risk-averse, outcome-based models are ill-suited to address interconnected crises, and propose the Human Learning Systems (+) model—an approach that enables funders and grantees to consider system-scale elements such as local economic drivers and political conditions,
The author argues that large-scale corporate artificial intelligence, or “Big AI,” is accelerating a converging set of ecological, cultural, and linguistic crises that together constitute a global metacrisis. Focusing on large language models, the article examines how these technologies intensify environmental pressures, undermine meaning-making and democratic processes, and contribute to the marginalization and loss of
Big AI is accelerating the metacrisis: What can we do? Read More »
This article critically examines the concept of polycrisis, tracing its evolution from rhetorical buzzword to an emerging analytical lens in sustainability and crisis research. Based on a Q-methodology study involving 50 experts, the authors identify four distinct framings of polycrisis: as analytically tractable, as networked shocks, as a global governance challenge, and as requiring conceptual
More Than a Buzzword? Mapping Interpretations of the ‘Polycrisis’ Read More »
This article introduces the Crisis Database, a comprehensive resource that systematically documents 168 historical societal crises across different time periods, regions, and levels of complexity. Aiming to overcome small-sample bias in previous studies, the database captures a wide range of political, economic, cultural, and institutional factors associated with crises, as well as their consequences—such as
This article introduces a focus collection on systemic risk science, arguing that systemic risks, are increasingly amplified by global warming yet remain poorly understood. It summarizes six contributing papers that highlight methodological advances in flood risk monitoring, critical infrastructure modelling, agent-based modelling, and the use of artificial intelligence in climate adaptation, while noting that current
This article interrogates the concept of ‘polycrisis’ through a decolonial, Global South-centered lens, arguing that current polycrisis discourse inadequately addresses entrenched global inequalities and power asymmetries. It contends that the convergence of crises is not a novel universal condition but a structural feature of neoliberal global capitalism, long experienced in the Global South. The author
Polycrisis and Global Inequality Read More »
The authors examine the concept of synergy and its applications in the polycrisis context. They present an integrative review of 14 disciplines and identify three key attributes of synergy: its magnitudes, spatial and temporal scales, and the possibility for both positive and negative synergy. The review also outlines three conceptual understandings: synergy as outcome, synergy
Synergies: Understandings in a Complex World Read More »
