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Lessons from the Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk 2026

This post reflects on the 2026 Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk, examining governance challenges across nuclear war, AI and the information ecosystem, pandemics, and climate change. It argues that the field is increasingly shifting its attention from human extinction toward potentially severe global catastrophes and that prevention alone is insufficient, particularly given persistent failures to […]

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Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic Risk: A Definitional Field Guide to the Reality of Everything

This blog post presents a short field guide to the definitions of global catastrophic risk, systemic risk, polycrisis, and metacrisis, arguing that the terms are frequently used interchangeably but that they describe distinct layers of humanity’s predicament. The author organises the definitions as a chain of four questions: what could go badly wrong? (global catastrophic

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Adapting The Way We Govern to Cope with ‘Polycrisis’

This article explores governance strategies for navigating the growing polycrisis, emphasizing the need for an adaptive, multi-level, and collaborative governance approach to enhance adaptability, cooperation, and resilience. Key strategies include multi-level governance, managing the political and bureaucratic landscape, and fostering personal and organizational resilience to ensure effective crisis response.

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Local Organizing in a Polycrisis Era, American Politics, Healthy Democracy, Polycrisis

In this four-part essay series, Jacob Bornstein and Mesa Sebree explore the concept and nature of the polycrisis. The series offers insight into topics such as how social change works in a polycrisis era, the next steps for dealing with polycrisis, and factors for societal resilience in a polycrisis era. Subsequent posts in this series

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The Polycrisis: Behind The Buzzword

This article discusses the emergence of the word ‘polycrisis’ in 2023, noting its rise to prominence at the 53rd World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, and seeks to underscore the gravity behind it. Larchman provides a primer, in which she defines polycrisis, in part, as “a cluster of interconnected crises in which ‘the overall impact exceeds

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Polycrisis? What Polycrisis?

Alistair Benn argues that the polycrisis, with its overwhelming notion of multiple inter-related crises, is an illusory product of social media technologies that overload users with “shock after shock” and create a false impression of connections between the world’s problems. The solution to the polycrisis is thus to reduce exposure to social media and better

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The Great Disruption has Begun

Paul Gilding argues that the world has reached “a multi-system tipping point” that will bring “the Great Disruption”: “a destabilisation of the global climate system at a scale that is so chaotic, unpredictable and costly, it will trigger cascading disruptive change in the global economy, national politics, investment markets and geopolitical security.” Gilding predicts that

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