Academic Journal Article

Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement

The authors translate polycrisis from a loose concept into a research agenda by providing the concept with a substantive definition, highlighting its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and developing a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world’s crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or […]

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Evolution of the Polycrisis: Anthropocene Traps that Challenge Global Sustainability

In this article, the authors, inspired by the polycrisis, identify and explore potential 14 traps affecting humanity in the global human context, brought about by the trajectory of our increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system. These traps are then categorized as global, technological, or structural traps and then further assessed to produce statistical

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Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability

Using expert solicitation, the authors identify 14 “evolutionary traps” (global, technological, and structural) that risk locking humanity into unfavorable (maladaptive) trajectories that seriously restrict its ability to adapt to the Anthropocene. These traps develop over four phases: initiation, scaling, masking (of harmful interactions), and trapping. The fourth phase involves one of five trapping mechanisms: constraints,

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Navigating the polycrisis—governing for transformation: The 2024 agenda for the systems community

In this article, the authors argue that the polycrisis is the manifestation of challenges outlined by the earlier scholarship of the “global problematique,” a set of systemically related factors including political, social, and ecological challenges such as pollution, resource depletion, and population growth. The polycrisis is recognized as the outcome of profound governance crises that

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Understanding Polycrisis: Definitions, Applications, and Responses

This paper compares conceptualizations of the term “polycrisis,” raising questions about the key aspects of different definitions while stressing a convergence in critical features. It conceives a polycrisis as a state in which multiple, macroregional, ecologically embedded, and inexorably interconnected systems face high – and advancing – risk across socioeconomic, political, and other dimensions. After

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The Polycrisis

Ville Lähde explores various considerations involved in the coining of new terms and concepts, such as polycrisis. He highlights in particular the difference between those who speak of the polycrisis as a totalizing description of the present era and its existential problems, and those who speak of a polycrisis “as a technical concept with which

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The Human Ecology of Overshoot: Why a Major ‘Population Correction’ is Inevitable

Using an evolutionary ecology perspective, William E. Rees argues that modern techno-industrial society is in a state of advanced ecological overshoot. Fossil fuels have enabled a massive expansion of humanity that constitutes the most globally significant ecological phenomena in 250 000 years of human evolutionary history. He concludes that humanity is exhibiting the dynamic of

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Polycrisis or Crises of Capitalist Social Reproduction

Kanishka Jayasuriya argues that polycrisis is a helpful descriptive term for the novel, intersecting crises of the 21st century, but it should be understood as a political crisis arising from the contradiction between capital accumulation and the social reproduction (the conditions of life) on which capitalism depends. Established political frameworks are unable to manage the

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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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