David Henig and Daniel M. Knight argue that anthropology has much to offer in the conceptualization and study of polycrisis, drawing on a disciplinary “toolkit that includes historicity, temporality, scalarity and intersectionality, which adds much needed texture to the polycrisis theory” (p. 4). The authors consider the nature of crisis as an abrupt disruption versus […]
Polycrisis: Prompts for an Emerging Worldview Read More »
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
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 »
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 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
