This 18th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is based on a risk perceptions survey of 1200 experts on the likelihood, severity, and interconnections between 37 global risks. It finds that the biggest risk in the next two years is the cost of living crisis, and the biggest risk in the next […]
Global Risks Report 2023 Read More »
Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan present their top ten geopolitical risks for 2023: an increasingly rogue and reckless Russia; an increasingly powerful and unconstrained Xi Jinping; the weaponization of artificial intelligence; shockwaves of global inflation; Iran backed into a corner; higher energy prices; reversals of development; political divisions in the United States; the disruptive digital
The report highlights the distinctive harms for children and future generations of eight global trends that are part of the polycrisis: continued impacts of the pandemic, inflation, food insecurity, energy shortages, underinvestment in children, threats to democratic rights, international factionalism, and internet inequality.
Prospects for Children in the Polycrisis: A 2023 Global Outlook 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 »
Wolf argues that we cannot think about and address the many problems facing the world separately from one another. “The alternative of thinking about the interactions among [macroeconomics, finance, politics, social change, disease, and the environment] is also too hard. But sometimes, as now, it becomes inescapable… The point is that we need to analyse
How to Think about Policy in a Polycrisis Read More »
Güney Işikara argues that “obscure jargon” like ‘overlapping emergencies’ and polycrisis “serve, with or without intention, to conceal the culprit, namely the totality of capitalist relations” as the fundamental source of the world’s problems. “Within this depoliticizing and neutralizing narrative, capitalism at best looms as an imperceptible, shadowy figure in the background, not worth problematizing,
Beating Around the Bush: Polycrisis, Overlapping Emergencies, and Capitalism Read More »
Noting that “This is not our first polycrisis”, the authors point out that actors in the Global South proposed a “New International Economic Order (NIEO)” to deal with the polycrisis of the 1970s by addressing food shortages, international debt, control over natural resources, and technology transfers. While the original NIEO failed, Progressive International has launched
The New International Economic Order Read More »
Cameron Hill discusses a “range of proposals to reform the international development finance architecture in ways that might alleviate some of the worst effects of the multiple global shocks for low- and middle-income countries. This blog canvasses several of the more prominent proposals, including the dilemmas and trade-offs they raise.” He focuses on “debt, global
The ‘Polycrisis’ and Global Development Finance: Options and Dilemmas Read More »
Highlighting the connections between economic and non-economic shocks to the world, Adam Tooze proposes that “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the
Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis Read More »
The author defines megathreats as “severe problems that could cause vast damage and misery and cannot be solved quickly or easily” (p. 4). “We are facing megathreats unlike anything we have faced before… [and] they overlap and reinforce one another” (p. 5). Roubini explores ten megathreats: debt accumulation and debt traps; easy money and financial crises;
Megathreats: Ten Dangerous Trends that Imperil Our Future and How to Survive Them Read More »
