Adam Tooze examines the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic on finance and business, highlighting just how unprepared and vulnerable economic systems were to the crisis. He highlights the ways in which institutional failures, political interests, economic policies, and geopolitics interacted with the pandemic to shape its impacts. Characterizing the situation as a polycrisis, he applies […]
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy Read More »
Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens confront the possibility of civilizational collapse within our lifetimes, examining scientific evidence of growing systemic crises. They connect abstract scientific findings to everyday experiences, linking the Anthropocene to our daily lives.
How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times Read More »
The authors argue that the worldwide production and distribution of food, fuel, and fibre has created a “global production ecosystem” subject to immense simplification, intensification, and control by humans attempting to maximize efficiency. The resulting system is homogenous, highly connected, and has weak feedbacks – “features [that] converge to yield high and predictable supplies of
Anatomy and Resilience of the Global Production Ecosystem Read More »
Mark Swilling proposes that “we need to understand the dynamics of the current global polycrisis as the emergent outcome of intersections between four dimensions of transition: socio-metabolic transition, techno-economic transition, socio-technical transition and long-term global development cycles. When understood as multiple cycles that intersect concurrently and asynchronistically across these four dimensions, the emergent outcome can
The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World Read More »
In this speech, then President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Junker uses the term polycrisis (albeit only once) to refer to the combined migration, financial, and Brexit crises facing Europe. He proposed: “It is not so long ago that our Union was in danger of sleepwalking from one crisis to another without waking up… Since
The authors clarify the systemic risk concept using the Global Financial Crisis as an example. They explain how global systems involve micro and macro-dynamics interacting with each other and their environment, leading to stable periods and multiple possible future scenarios. Some of these scenarios may pose catastrophic risks, so that agents must confront systemic risk.
Things are Different Today: The Challenge of Global Systemic Risks Read More »
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker uses the term polycrisis to describe Europe’s governance challenges amidst the Greek debt crisis, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the surge of Syrian refugees into Europe, and the pending Brexit vote. These problems “have not only arrived at the same time. They also feed each other, creating a sense of doubt
The authors argue that the world constitutes a tightly coupled, global complex system that endogenously generates systemic risks and vulnerabilities as it grows more complex. After discussing complexity, risk, and networks as key elements of their framework, they provide case studies of global systemic risk in trade, finance, infrastructure, climate change, and public health. The
The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk Read More »
The authors argue we are increasingly witnessing a new form global crises they characterize as “synchronous failure.” This form of crisis “is more biophysical in origin, more inter-systemic in manifestation, more global in scope, and more rapid in development” (5). The deep cause of synchronous failure are increases in energy throughput, heightened global connectivity, and
Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis Read More »
Mark Swilling analyzes economic crises from both a global and a more regional (global south/South African) perspective, examining sociological and technological changes from the post-WWII era into the future green economy. He notes that “a growing body of popular and academic literature has turned to long-wave theory to contextualise the crisis and predict the system
Economic Crisis, Long Waves and the Sustainability Transition: An African Perspective Read More »
