The report outlines the results of the strategic foresight and horizon scanning developed by UNEP to help navigate current and future uncertainty and disruptive change. It presents insights on eight critical global shifts that are accelerating the planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity and nature loss and, pollution and waste.
Global Tipping Points is a report, led by the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and funded by the Bezos Earth Fund, that identifies negative and positive tipping points with regards to ongoing global crises. According to the report, the existence of negative tipping points shows that the threats posed by the current crises we
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In this video, Dr. Sabrina Fernandes discusses how to rethink the Polycrisis from an internationalist Global South perspective and how it relates to transition and climate justice. Fernandes begins by using an aerial photograph as an illustration of the influences human actions have on nature and the climate crisis. Fernandes then touches on topics such
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In this article, the authors, inspired by the polycrisis, identify and explore potential 14 traps affecting humanity in the global human context, brought about by the trajectory of our increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system. These traps are then categorized as global, technological, or structural traps and then further assessed to produce statistical
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Using expert solicitation, the authors identify 14 “evolutionary traps” (global, technological, and structural) that risk locking humanity into unfavorable (maladaptive) trajectories that seriously restrict its ability to adapt to the Anthropocene. These traps develop over four phases: initiation, scaling, masking (of harmful interactions), and trapping. The fourth phase involves one of five trapping mechanisms: constraints,
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In this article, the authors argue that the polycrisis is the manifestation of challenges outlined by the earlier scholarship of the “global problematique,” a set of systemically related factors including political, social, and ecological challenges such as pollution, resource depletion, and population growth. The polycrisis is recognized as the outcome of profound governance crises that
This edited volume argues that humanity has entered a fundamentally novel era of existential risk. These risks range from global-scale natural disasters (like volcanic super-eruptions) to anthropogenic environmental destabilization (like climate change and loss of biosphere integrity), and from calamities that spread rapidly around our highly networked planet (like viruses and cyber threats) to the
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The authors argue that a trigger event can’t start a crisis by itself; some underlying stress or stresses must also be operating. They contend that leaders should pay far more attention to these stresses, because they’re ultimately far more important. The original title of the article was “Let’s Avoid ‘Trigger Fixation.” The Globe and Mail
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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
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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
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