<aside> 💡
AI Summary:
Image source
Image source: The interconnectedness of world problems (based on Lester Brown, Plan B, 2008).
Source: “The coronavirus pandemic has brought the interconnectedness and fragility of global systems into stark relief. In this way the pandemic is a warning from the future – a future in which the growing consequences of the climate and broader ecological emergency are expected to increasingly destabilize societies around the world. These consequences will impact societies already suffering from a host of social and economic problems, from high levels of inequality and political fragmentation to economic instability and the ongoing shock of the pandemic. Just as we must contend with feedback loops in natural systems, so too must we reckon with the prospect of environmental breakdown driving cascading destabilization in critical economic, energy, food, and socio-political systems, and vice versa. Through a series of pre-recorded interviews and a live panel discussion with some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on these topics, ‘The Great Unraveling?’ explores some of the key drivers of destabilization and how they may interact with one another.”
Images source: “Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this pattern’s deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes. The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that system’s behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale. Case studies of the 2008-2009 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate the framework. Suggestions are offered for future research to explore further the framework’s propositions.”
Image source: “[This is a] provisional and highly debatable matrix of interactions between the different macroscopic risks facing us over the next 6-18 months. The question that the table asks is how do the risks listed in each row of column 1, affect the risks laid out from left to right across the table. For sake of clarity I have divided the stagflation risk into a risk of recession and a risk of accelerating inflation. What this matrix helps us to do is to distinguish types of risk by the degree and type of their interconnectedness. The risk of nuclear escalation stands out for the fact that it is not significantly affected by any of the other risks. It will be decided by the logic of the war and decision-making in Moscow and Washington. A food crisis does not make a nuclear escalation any more, or less likely. On the other hand, a nuclear escalation would, to say the least, dramatically escalate several of the other risks. Continuing inflation will likely function as a driver of several other risks, but those risks in turn (COVID, recession, EZ sov debt crisis) will likely deescalate the risk of inflation. I would not say that this is a forecast, but it does bias me towards thinking that inflation will be transitory. Most of the big shocks that we may expect, tend to be deflationary in their impact. Conversely, a recession seems ever more likely in part because the effect of most of the bad shocks we may expect - from COVID, mounting inflation, or a fiscal deadlock in Congress - point in that direction. The obvious next step is to ask whether the feedback loops in the matrix are positive or negative. So, for instance, a recession makes a Eurozone sovereign debt crisis more likely, which in turns would unleash serious deflationary pressures across Europe. Conversely, inflation in fact seems self-calming. The effects it produces tend rather the dampen inflation than to feed an acceleration. At least as I have specified the matrix here. A global hunger crisis seems alarmingly likely in part because all the other major risks will exacerbate that problem. A hunger crisis, however, will largely affect poor and powerless people in low-income countries, so it is unlikely to feedback in exacerbating any of the other major crises… our conclusions of its likely impact would be different if we add in the question of migration… This is not inevitable, this is not a prophecy of doom. But it is an assessment of multiple and compounding risks… A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.” See also this.
[Source](https://angleofvision.org/2022/04/07/changing-times/'): “…in addition to the measurable geophysical parameters of the polycrisis, there are a wide range of measurable social indicators that can fruitfully be studied. The polycrisis itself is an ‘unbounded’ reality—the metamorphosis of the entire biosphere including humanity. But unbounded questions cannot be studied in their entirety. The more we identify the best sets of indicators to look at any specific set of questions we pose, the more informed our perceptions will be… ‘In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and ‘wicked’ denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is ‘a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point.’ Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.’ While it may certainly be useful to see the polycrisis as a wicked problem, there actually do seem to be policies and practices that would mitigate it. Limiting climate change, increasing equity, preserving biodiversity, building a global security system that lowered defense expenditures, reversing the toxification of the biosphere, and agreeing to core human values to guide our shared future are a few examples. Working toward these great goals would mitigate the polycrisis—but only if even the most successful efforts in one sector did not worsen things in another sector. For example, increasing incomes for the lowest third of the world population could increase consumption and degrade biodiversity unless consumption among higher income groups comparably decreased—or unless we massively greened the consumption cycle…
If we ignore the reality of the global polycrisis, many of our personal and collective strategies will sink under both known and unforeseen future shocks. If we give up hope, and do not fight and work for a better future, the outcomes will almost certainly be even worse… We may or may not be able to change the arc of the global polycrisis significantly as a species. Yet each day we are given countless small opportunities to alleviate suffering… We have countless small ways to make a difference for the people, critters and conditions we can affect. Living this way imbues us with a sense of hope. Whatever the outcome in the long run, in our time we align ourselves with the forces of life… The ultimate question for each of us is not to determine how the world will go. We cannot control it. We cannot know. The ultimate question for each of us is how we live our lives. In the face of the reality of the polycrisis, do we choose ways of seeing ourselves and others that leads us to anguish, cynicism, resignation and despair? Or do we discover a way of seeing and living that leads us to lives of courage, service, gratitude, compassion and peace?”
Source: “Tipping points in complex systems may imply risks of unwanted collapse, but also opportunities for positive change. Our capacity to navigate such risks and opportunities can be boosted by combining emerging insights from two unconnected fields of research. One line of work is revealing fundamental architectural features that may cause ecological networks, financial markets, and other complex systems to have tipping points. Another field of research is uncovering generic empirical indicators of the proximity to such critical thresholds. Although sudden shifts in complex systems will inevitably continue to surprise us, work at the crossroads of these emerging fields offers new approaches for anticipating critical transitions.”
Images source: “Humanity faces an array of grave, long-term challenges, now often labeled ‘global systemic risks.’ They include climate heating, biodiversity loss, pandemics, widening economic inequalities, financial system instability, ideological extremism, pernicious social impacts of digitalization, cyber attacks, mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced migrations, and an escalating danger of nuclear war. Compared to humanity’s situation even two decades ago, most of these risks appear to be increasing in severity (risk amplification) at a faster rate (risk acceleration), while the crises they generate seem to be occurring more often simultaneously (risk synchronization)… Two trends are powerfully contributing to risk acceleration and amplification: the growth in scale of humanity’s resource consumption and pollution output beyond boundaries defining planetary resilience; and the vastly greater connectivity between human systems permitting higher volume and velocity of long-distance flows of matter, energy, and information… We need a better grasp of 1. the underlying mechanisms that currently link (or could link) different global systemic risks, 2. how humanity might leverage the nonlinear dynamics of global systems for rapid, positive change, and 3. improved modes of governance of both global systemic risks and mitigative interventions. To aid research in this direction and guide hypothesis development, we propose a four-part framework of concepts and propositions (see attached image). First, we distinguish conceptually between nine global systems in three macro-categories encompassing natural, technological, and social phenomena: biophysical systems of atmosphere, water, and living matter; socio-metabolic systems of material (including industrial) production, agriculture, and health; and cultural-institutional systems of symbolic production (providing meaning, legitimacy, and coherence), societal governance, and international order. Second, we propose that positive feedbacks are significantly amplifying and accelerating systemic risks within these nine systems and synchronizing crises across them. Research on the causal dynamics of complex systems shows that at least four distinct mechanisms can generate the nonlinear instabilities we currently observe in global systems: 1. adaptive failure when a system’s stabilizing negative feedbacks are weakened or overloaded; 2. critical transitions between systemic equilibria; 3. contagion, as a pathogenic organism, idea, or technology jumps from node to node in a network; and 4. cascading breakdown when an individual node or link’s failure propagates via a system’s structural interdependencies. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive and indeed may operate simultaneously or sequentially. Growth in scale and connectivity of human activity likely amplifies and accelerates all four mechanisms’ operation within and among global systems. But greater scale and connectivity by themselves appear insufficient explanations of today’s emerging multiplicity and especially synchronization of crises. As intuited by the respondents to the Future Earth survey, something else seems to be happening, and we argue the additional factor is a proliferation of positive (self-reinforcing) feedbacks… Third, researchers can better study these less visible processes, we argue, by conceptually distinguishing between global systems themselves and the ‘substrate’ that creates pathways for operation of causal mechanisms (like the four above) between these systems.”
Images source. See also the original publication: "Multiple global crises – including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia's war on Ukraine – have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. A growing number of scholars and policymakers characterize the situation as a ‘polycrisis’. Yet this neologism remains poorly defined. We provide the concept with a substantive definition, highlight its value-added in comparison to related concepts, and develop a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world's crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combine with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium. We then identify three causal pathways – common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks – that can connect multiple global systems to produce synchronized crises. Drawing on current examples, we show that the polycrisis concept is a valuable tool for understanding ongoing crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future research.”
Source: “Two factors are powerfully driving risk amplification and acceleration. First, the magnitude of humanity’s resource consumption and pollution output is weakening the resilience of natural systems, worsening the risks of climate heating, biodiversity decline and zoonotic viral outbreaks. Second, vastly greater connectivity among our economic and social systems has sharply raised the volume and velocity of long-distance flows of materials, energy, and information, aggravating such risks as financial system instability, pandemics, economic inequality and ideological extremism. The simultaneity of crises we’re experiencing hints that something else is also happening — risk synchronization. Complex and largely unrecognized causal links among the world’s economic, social and ecological systems may be causing many risks to go critical at nearly the same time. If so, the apparent simultaneity isn’t just a temporary coincidence; it’s likely to persist and could ultimately overwhelm the capacity of society to adapt, and push some places into outright collapse, as we may be witnessing right now in Haiti.”
An invitation (expired) to contribute to a special issue on the topic of Polycrisis in the Anthropocene.
Source: “…in reality, new phenomena are now reconfiguring and even overwhelming old trends at an accelerating rate… [these include:] Total human energy consumption; Earth’s energy balance; The human population’s total biomass; Connectivity of the human population… Of the four changes I’ve highlighted, only the sharp increase in Earth’s energy imbalance is unequivocally a bad thing, at least for human well-being. But all four are markers of an unprecedented transformation in humanity’s circumstances — an explosive rise in human population, material consumption, connectivity, and global environmental impact beginning around 1950 that some scientists call the ‘great acceleration.’ The acceleration of overall change is important. Yet even more important are the less-recognized causal interactions among discrete changes like the four I’ve highlighted. And it’s these interactions that are generating today’s polycrisis… Scientists have shown that ecological, technological, or social systems that are both highly connected and highly homogeneous are especially prone to cascading failures — that is, to failures that resemble a row of dominoes falling over. High connectivity lets a disruption — for instance, a pathogen or external shock — move quickly from one part of a system to other parts; high homogeneity ensures the disruption’s impact is similar across those parts… this diversity decline is combining with hyperconnectivity to produce cascading failures when key systems are hit by sudden shock. The pandemic snarled just-in-time supply chains of standardized goods that stretched worldwide, catalyzing global inflation. Ransomware attacks exploiting standardized software now regularly cause ramifying damage to vital services, including health and energy infrastructure. Sometime in the not-distant future, extreme weather will likely hit multiple breadbaskets simultaneously, leading to disruption in the worldwide trade of standardized grains that provides a large fraction of humanity’s calories.”
Source: A blog post quickly summarizing uses of the term polycrisis and some framings: “I am not sure we can actually think through the polycrisis framing, or at least without a lot of work. Listening to politicians, analysts, and academics, I often hear them focusing not on the poly- but on the -crisis, even at the grand strategic level. They break up the cluster into separate crises or at most clumps of two: a rising right wing political-cultural movement acting against the climate movement while also driving pandemic denial, for example… What I’m looking for now is for newer frameworks that include the present polycrisis and also help us think through futures to follow. Put another way, how can we think of the whole polycrisis altogether, in a better and more effective fashion?”
Images source: “The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we present results from a participatory mapping. We identify 14 traps and categorize them as either global, technology or structural traps. An assessment reveals that 12 traps (86%) could be in an advanced phase of trapping with high risk of hard-to-reverse lock-ins and growing risks of negative impacts on human well-being. Ten traps (71%) currently see growing trends in their indicators. Revealing the systemic nature of the polycrisis, we assess that Anthropocene traps often interact reinforcingly (45% of pairwise interactions), and rarely in a dampening fashion (3%). We end by discussing capacities that will be important for navigating these systemic challenges in pursuit of global sustainability. Doing so, we introduce evolvability as a unifying concept for such research between the sustainability and evolutionary sciences.”
Source: World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice
Source: Why “Warning to Humanity” gets the socio-ecological crisis (and its solutions) wrong
Source: "This foresight brief reflects on the ways the increased pace of globalization has brought with it a slew of new, complex and often interconnected risks. Solving these complex problems and the heightened uncertainty they bring will require new modes of long-term and cross-disciplinary thinking. The brief explores implications for what types of risk assessment, policy measures, governance and programming might strengthen long-term thinking in the face of increasingly uncertain futures.”
Source: "The Cascade Institute uses stakeholder and social network mapping tools to better understand our strategic environment, to identify and engage with key stakeholders, and to better assess our impact. Here, we present a visualization of an ongoing mapping exercise of people and organizations engaged in work on complex systems, climate change and energy transition, green/just recovery, and other fields relevant to CI. We include actors from across academic, philanthropic, civil society, government, and private sectors. Our database is built in Airtable and visualized using a systems mapping tool called Kumu, and functions essentially as a digital network rolodex. The map will continue to evolve as we regularly learn about new efforts and build new relationships.”
Source: "Here, we present all the participants in the V. K. Rasmussen Foundation’s Exploring the Polycrisis conference, affiliated institutions working on related themes, and their connections.”
Source: “The COVID-19 pandemic poses fundamental challenges to the ways that the discipline of International Relations makes sense of our world. Framing the pandemic as both a social disaster and as part of an ongoing polycrisis, this work argues that existing responses to COVID-19 are, whatever their insights, partial and limited, predicated on assumptions about how we know the world now shown to be problematic. This situation calls less for some defined incremental change and more for a period of uncomfortable disciplinary reflection on the boundaries, purposes and value structures that shape IR.”
Source: “Mathew Davies and Christopher Hobson argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is part of an ongoing polycrisis that requires significant changes to the ways in which the discipline of International Relations understands the world. They propose that ‘Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes [that] closely interact with one another, bending, blurring and amplifying each other’ (p. 160). They then identify eight key properties of a polycrisis: the simultaneity of crises; feedback loops between crises; amplification of one crisis by another; the lack of clear boundaries between crises; the layering of different interest group concerns over crises; the lack of shared definitions of crises; cross-purposes in which efforts to remediate on crisis worsen another; and emergent properties in which the harms of the polycrisis are greater than the sum of its parts. The authors ultimately caution against too hastily defining the pandemic and its significance, proposing that we must instead ‘stay with the ambivalence and discomfort of the present moment’ (p. 162).”