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This blog post presents a short field guide to the definitions of global catastrophic risk, systemic risk, polycrisis, and metacrisis, arguing that the terms are frequently used interchangeably but that they describe distinct layers of humanity’s predicament. The author organises the definitions as a chain of four questions: what could go badly wrong? (global catastrophic […]
This article profiles academic centres and initiatives working to analyse and mitigate existential and global catastrophic risks, including the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, the Existential Risk Laboratory (XLab) at the University of Chicago, and the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative. It highlights that these centres bring together
Multidisciplinary Teams Seek Ways to Mitigate Existential Threats Read More »
The authors evaluate the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Reports (GRRs) from 2006–2024 by comparing survey-based risk likelihoods with a multi-decadal database of national shocks, and by tracing how surveys are translated into the reports’ narratives. Across eight shock categories, they find limited and uneven prospective alignment with observed shock frequency — with only geopolitical
Anticipatory Skill and Structural Biases of a Major Global Risk Assessment Read More »
This article examines how NGOs contribute to resilience in a polycrisis context, focusing on the response of Czech NGOs to the Ukrainian refugee crisis following the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a two-year mixed-methods study combining interviews with NGO leaders and a survey of 235 organisations, the authors identify three key resilience strategies: cross-organisational collaboration, mobilisation
This introduction to the special issue “Temporal Turbulence in the Polycrisis” examines how the contemporary polycrisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ongoing colonial legacies challenges conventional understandings of time and temporality. The authors argue that environmental crises cannot be fully understood as technical or future-oriented problems but must be situated within the long historical
Temporal Turbulence in the Polycrisis: Editors’ Introduction to the Special Section Read More »
This review argues that nanostructured sensors can play an important role in addressing the polycrisis, including climate instability, antimicrobial resistance, pandemics, and emerging technological disruptions, but that their effectiveness is limited by the complexity and scale of the data they generate. The authors propose unsupervised machine intelligence as a critical bridge between advanced sensing materials
The author traces the intellectual history of the concept of “polycrisis” from Edgar Morin’s original theory of crisology in the 1970s to its widespread contemporary use after 2022. Drawing on Morin’s primary texts, a systematic review of 257 publications, and a multilingual bibliometric analysis covering fifteen languages, the study identifies several transmission pathways through which
From Crisology to Polycrisis: A Genealogy of the Concept of Polycrisis Read More »
This article argues that the polycrisis concepts provides an important lens for understanding contemporary employment relations. The authors suggest that the employment relationship is both a key site where the impacts of overlapping crises are experienced and a central mechanism through which capitalist economies generate profit and reproduce systemic vulnerabilities. Examining employment relations across different
This article examines the polycrisis as a framework for understanding and governing interconnected risks across social, ecological, economic, and political systems. Using a comparative analysis of the European Union and China, the authors explore how different approaches to transition governance can support sustainability under conditions of overlapping crises and systemic uncertainty. The article identifies four
This article argues that addressing the polycrisis requires stronger approaches to systemic risk governance. The authors propose that effective governance must move beyond sector-specific responses and be guided by shared principles capable of addressing complex, interconnected challenges. They present ten principles to guide the development of systemic risk assessment and response across multiple domains: universal
Principles for Just and Effective Systemic Risk Governance Read More »
