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 […]
The Great Disruption has Begun Read More »
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
Polycrisis or Crises of Capitalist Social Reproduction Read More »
The article reports on a presentation by Dr. Alan Dupont, chief executive of Cognoscenti, at the Australasia Investor Relations Association’s 2023 annual convention. Dupont argued that, in an era of polycrisis, geopolitical risk should become a third pillar of environmental and social governance (ESG).
What a ‘Polycrisis’ is and What it Means for Business Read More »
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
Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement Read More »
In this report for the Strategic Innovation Unit of the United Nations Development Programme, Zack Walsh argues that the underlying driver of the polycrisis is our unsustainable and unjust economic systems, and the polycrisis opens opportunities to transform those systems. Additional drivers include overshoot, inequality, complexity, and uniformity and interconnectedness. The article then considers two
Global Polycrisis as a Pathway to Economic Transition Read More »
This article by the Head of Multi-Asset Funds proposes that the UK economy and global equities are potential losers of the polycrisis, while equities in healthcare, energy, and raw materials may be poised as winners, where polycrisis has spurred innovation and demand. It then considers the uncertain prospects for Japan’s monetary policy and its zero-inflation
Investing in the Age of Polycrisis Read More »
Tim Palmer discusses the challenges of predicting events in nonlinear systems that, by nature, experience intermittent instabilities, as in the famous “butterfly effect”. Today, continued emissions are increasing the instabilities and uncertainties of climate change, while the economy and global health exhibit similar non-linearities. To deal with such uncertainties, he advocates ensemble prediction systems that
Why the World Feels so Unstable Right Now Read More »
Adam Tooze argues that there are three ways to reconcile “the feverish talk of deglobalisation and decoupling” with statistics that “show an inertial continuity in trade and investment patterns: business as usual, insofar as nothing has changed and the deglobalisation talk is empty; a new Cold War in which the US is trying seriously to
Three Ways to Read the ‘Deglobalisation’ Debate Read More »
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 »
Farwa Sial argues that the polycrisis neologism is a feint that allows international financial institutions to continue business as usual by obscuring their role in global problems. She critiques definitions of polycrisis for downplaying the role of capitalism and global power hierarchies in the perpetuation of contemporary crises, and for overlooking the experiences of the
