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In his address to the World Economic Forum, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres proposed that “Our world is plagued by a perfect storm on a number of fronts”, including an economic crisis (involving slowdown, inflation, rising cost of living, and high debt), the lingering effects of the covid-19 pandemic (alongside ill-preparedness for the next pandemic), […]
Secretary-General’s Remarks at the World Economic Forum Read More »
In response to the 2023 World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Michael Peregrine argues that “the emphasis on polycrisis calls on boards to not only look more broadly on global risks that might affect the company’s business, but also to look at them in a different way. The fundamental governance message of polycrisis is to
Reporting on the first day of the World Economic Forum’s 2023 summit in Davos, Time magazine writer Yasmeen Serhan notes that “polycrisis” is the “most ubiquitous buzzword” of the meeting.
Why ‘Polycrisis’ was the Buzzword of Day 1 in Davos Read More »
In this inaugural panel of the 2023 World Economic Forum summit Adam Tooze asserts that the term polycrisis aptly characterizes the state of the world, while Historian Niall Ferguson dismisses polycrisis as an “illusion” or “mirage” and argues that humanity’s present troubles are “just history happening.”
De-Globalization or Re-Globalization? Read More »
Jonathan Derbyshire characterizes the year 2022 as a polycrisis, discusses the origins of the term, and provides the definition: “Noun: collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises of an environmental, geopolitical and economic nature.”
Year in a Word: Polycrisis Read More »
Mosharraf Zaidi argues that Pakistan has for decades experienced a polycrisis composed of abject poverty, gender inequality, insecurity of life and property, risk of mass killing, and threat of sovereign default, with no improvements in sight. Additional stresses include extreme weather, a politically involved military, right-wing extremist groups, and the ongoing conflict with India. The author
Our ‘Permacrisis of Polycrisis’ Read More »
The author depicts “polycrisis as a wake-up call for siloed technocratic elites to peer out of the silos at the interaction term” – as a reaction to our tendency to address crises in isolation from one another. He highlights climate change as the “metacrisis” within the polycrisis that is increasingly correlating once separable risks, as
Notes on the Polycrisis Read More »
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström argue that global crises are accelerating in their occurrence, amplifying in their effects, and synchronizing due to largely unseen causal connections between them. The result is a polycrisis, a term that “implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises.” The authors
What Happens when a Cascade of Crises Collide? Read More »
Economics commentator Noah Smith opposes the term polycrisis, arguing that it overestimates the interconnectivity and severity of contemporary crises. He further posits that there are buffers in place in most systems and that people come together at times of crises, preventing them from escalating or compounding. “I don’t see a polycrisis; I see an emerging
Against Polycrisis Read More »
Samanth Subramanian contests the utility of the term “polycrisis” and the novelty of the present situation it is used to capture. Where Adam Tooze argues that the present situation is unique for its lack of single causes and single fixes, Subramanian proposes that many historical episodes featured this condition, including the financial crises of the
The Case Against ‘Polycrisis’ Read More »
