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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 »
This discussion paper proposes that “A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly reduce humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply intertwined” (p. 2). The authors then elaborate
What is a Global Polycrisis? And how is it Different from a Systemic Risk? Read More »
The authors propose that hitherto unrecognized, complex teleconnections and self-reinforcing feedbacks among global systems are accelerating, amplifying, and synchronizing crises. The ultimate result of such unrecognized processes could be a global polycrisis—a single, macro-crisis of interconnected, runaway failures of Earth’s vital natural and social systems that irreversibly degrades humanity’s prospects. The authors therefore call for
A Call for an International Research Program on the Risk of a Global Polycrisis Read More »
In this blog, Richard Hames discusses polycrisis, societal collapse, existential risk, and related themes. Notable entries include: · “Existential Risk and The Method of Collapsology” (23 June 2022) · “The decisive moment” (01 July 2022) · “On Staying Woke in Polycrisis Futurism” (06 July 2022) · “Attention Deficit Hyperobject Disorder” (18 July 2022) · “The Stakes of Sri Lanka”
Daniel Hoyer examines qualitative, case study, complex system, and societal dynamics approaches to explain “historical precedents of collapse, growth, and resilience.” He explains drawbacks to each method, and stresses “the importance of developing formal (especially mathematically articulated) mechanistic theory, as only by explicating what we think drives societal outcomes in a structured, formal way can
