Health

2025’s Global Health Polycrisis: Climate, Contagion and the Limits of our Defences

This article explores how 2025 marked a defining year for global public health, shaped by a polycrisis of resurgent infectious diseases, climate-driven emergencies, antimicrobial resistance, and an escalating mental health burden. It details the re-emergence of diseases like measles and mpox, record-breaking dengue outbreaks, and rising drug-resistant infections, alongside the growing toll of extreme heat, […]

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Mapping the Hope Attractor: A Conversation with Thomas- Homer Dixon

In this conversation, Thomas Homer-Dixon introduces the Cascade Institute’s Polycrisis Core Model (PCM), a novel framework designed to map and analyse interactions among 11 critical global systems, each with multiple potential future states. The model employs cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis to evaluate over four million internally consistent scenarios, ultimately identifying 11 distinct “attractor” states. These

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Tackling the Complex Links Between Climate Change, Conflict, and Health

The authors underscore the urgent need to address the interconnected threats of climate change, conflict, and health. They highlight how these threats not only cause direct harm, such as heat-related deaths and conflict-driven mortality, but also compound vulnerabilities by damaging health systems, disrupting essential services, and fueling cycles of instability. Fragile and conflict-affected states are

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Decolonizing Mental Health in the Polycrisis: Pathways Toward Neuro-Decolonization

The authors argue that the root causes and drivers of the polycrisis lie within the modern/colonial system. Drawing on the work of Yellow Bird and collaborations with Indigenous communities in Brazil and Peru, they examine how neurocolonization—the systemic imprinting of separability, superiority, and subjugation onto ways of thinking, perceiving, relating, feeling, and being—has contributed to

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Spatial Mobility Under Crisis: Policy Responses and Migration Dynamics in Five Countries

The authors examine how public health crises have reshaped migration governance and spatial mobility. Focusing on the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, Brazil, and Ghana, the study analyzes policy responses and their implications for migration dynamics. The findings suggest that national responses were shaped by factors such as epidemic trajectories, economic conditions, healthcare systems, political

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Global Systemic Stresses: Understanding the Drivers of Polycrisis

This report introduces the Cascade Institute’s Stress-Trigger-Crisis model, a systemic framework that distinguishes between slow-moving stresses that erode the resilience of global systems and fast-moving trigger events that precipitate crises. It identifies 14 global systemic stresses that affect nine vital systems: climate, ecology, food, energy, economy, infrastructure, health, social order and governance, and world order.

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Global Health at a Crossroads: WHO’s 2025 Emergency Response to Outbreaks, Conflicts and Humanitarian Crises

The author examines how 2025 has become a pivotal year for global health, marked by converging crises such as conflict, disease outbreaks, climate shocks, and displacement that are impacting fragile health systems and exposing deep structural inequities. In response, the WHO’s $1.5 billion Health Emergency Appeal underscores the urgency of coordinated, resilient action, emphasizing mobile

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Exploring the Intersection between Artificial Intelligence and Biological Sciences: Focus on Uses and Challenges

This report examines how artificial intelligence is transforming biosafety, biosecurity, biodefense, and global health, while simultaneously introducing new biological risks. Drawing on a systematic review of 169 scientific articles and surveys of life science professionals across Latin America, it finds that AI tools are increasingly applied to epidemiological prediction, protein design, and laboratory automation, yet

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The Impact of Polycrisis on Healthcare Systems—Analyzing Challenges and the Role of Social Epidemiology

This article examines how overlapping global crises are converging to form a polycrisis that places unprecedented strain on healthcare systems worldwide. Applying social epidemiology to the analysis of polycrisis, the authors highlight how these interconnected threats amplify one another, exposing systemic vulnerabilities and deepening health inequities. Drawing on data from missed hospitalizations, conflict zones such

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