None Archives - Polycrisis

Lessons from the Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk 2026

This post reflects on the 2026 Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk, examining governance challenges across nuclear war, AI and the information ecosystem, pandemics, and climate change. It argues that the field is increasingly shifting its attention from human extinction toward potentially severe global catastrophes and that prevention alone is insufficient, particularly given persistent failures to

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Infrastructure Links Amplify Impacts

The authors develop a modelling framework to assess how natural hazards, intensified by climate change, propagate cascading failures across interdependent critical infrastructures. The framework is applied to interdependent power and water networks in North Italy under historical wind-gust conditions and under climate projections following Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5. The authors find that climate

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Reframing Sustainability in an Age of Polycrisis: Economic Models, Indicators, and a New Integrated Baseline for EU Governance

The author examines how sustainability should be reframed in the context of polycrisis. Focusing on the European Union, the article compares green growth, ecological economics, and post-growth approaches and assesses four major sustainability indicator families: the Sustainable Development Goals Index, Human Development Index, Ecological Footprint, and welfare-adjusted measures such as the Genuine Progress Indicator and

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Polycrisis Exploration Workshop

This guidance document provides detailed instructions on how to run the Joint Research Centre’s Polycrisis Exploration Workshop and use the resulting insights in policymaking. Based on the foresight study Risks on the Horizon, the workshop is designed to facilitate strategic conversations about increasingly interconnected risks, disasters, and potential polycrises. It guides participants through three activities:

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No Place to Hide? Regional Resilience and Vulnerability to Global Catastrophic Risk

The authors examine which locations are most resilient to global catastrophic risks, including nuclear war, near-Earth objects, major volcanic eruptions, large-scale cyberattacks, electromagnetic pulses, geomagnetic storms, and pandemics. They find that no location is resilient across all scenarios, although Australia demonstrates resilience across the widest range of risks considered. Common resilience factors include geographic isolation,

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World Economic Forum: Time to Retire “Polycrisis” for “Polytunity”

This edited conversation from the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Summer Davos examines Yuen Yuen Ang’s proposal to reframe “polycrisis” as “polytunity”, emphasising the opportunities for transformation that can emerge when multiple global systems experience disruption simultaneously. Yuen Yuen Ang argues that the concept of polycrisis can encourage a fear-driven and paralysing view of interconnected threats,

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Leaders Should Plan for Colliding Risks, Not Isolated Crises. Here’s Why

This article argues that businesses must move beyond managing individual threats and prepare for the cascading, compounding, and colliding effects of interconnected global risks. It highlights geopolitics, climate change, and artificial intelligence as systemic risk multipliers that can interact through concentrated supply chains, critical infrastructure, energy systems, and digital networks, while traditional shock absorbers such

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Global Insurance Market Report (GIMAR)

This mid-year report presents the interim findings of the IAIS 2026 Global Monitoring Exercise, concluding that the global insurance sector remains resilient despite growing macro-financial and geopolitical uncertainty. While insurers have maintained stable solvency, liquidity, and profitability, the report finds that aggregate systemic risk scores edged higher at year-end 2025, driven mainly by increased asset

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Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic Risk: A Definitional Field Guide to the Reality of Everything

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

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Multidisciplinary Teams Seek Ways to Mitigate Existential Threats

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

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