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DOI: 10.1017/sus.2024.1
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Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement
By: Michael Lawrence,1 Thomas Homer-Dixon,1 Scott Janzwood,1 Johan Rockstöm,2 Ortwin Renn,3 and
Jonathan F. Donges2, 4
1 The Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University, Victoria, V9B 5Y2, Canada
2 Potsdam Institute on Climate Impacts (PIK), Potsdam, 14473, Germany
3 Research Institute for Sustainability, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, Potsdam, D-14467, Germany
4 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, SE-106 91, Sweden
Review article submitted to Global Sustainability Journal
Wordcount (including text, footnotes, and boxes, excluding figure captions and reference list): 8234
Subject Categories: Policies, politics, and governance;
Themed Collection: Global systemic risk in the Anthropocene
Non-Technical Summary (79 words): The term “polycrisis” appears with growing frequently to capture
the interconnections between global crises, but the word lacks substantive content. In this article, we
convert it from an empty buzzword into a conceptual framework and research program that enables us
to better understand the causal linkages between contemporary crises. We draw upon the intersection
of climate change, the covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s war in Ukraine to illustrate these causal
interconnections and explore key features of the world’s present polycrisis.
Technical Summary (169 words): 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 combines 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 unfolding crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future
research.
Social Media Summary: No longer a mere buzzword, “polycrisis” analysis explores causal interactions
among crises to help navigate a tumultuous future.
Required Statements:
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1 Published online by Cambridge University Press
1) Acknowledgements: [none at this time]
2) Author Contributions: M. L. and T. H.-D. developed the polycrisis conceptual framework and
wrote the text with input from all co-authors and editing by S. J.
3) Financial Support: M. L. is supported by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and an Omega
Resilience Award. J.R. and J.F.D. acknowledge support from the European Research Council
Advanced Grant project ERA (Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene, ERC-2016-ADG-743080).
J.F.D. is grateful for financial support by the project PIK_Change (grant 01LS2001A) funded by
the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).
4) Conflicts of Interest: Michael Lawrence, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Scott Janzwood, Johan
Rockström, Ortwin Renn, and Jonathan F. Donges declare no conflict of interest.
5) Research Transparency and Reproducibility: not applicable.
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1 Published online by Cambridge University Press
1. Introduction: From perfect storms to polycrises
As war, extreme weather, hunger, energy scarcity, inflation, pandemics, and myriad other calamities fill
our daily news feeds, political leaders often declare that humanity is facing a “perfect storm” of crises.
This metaphor, however, is misleading (Homer-Dixon & Rockström, 2022). It implies the current
confluence of unfortunate events is merely a temporary coincidence—just plain bad luck.
But many of these leaders also recognize that today’s crises are intertwined in vital ways (for example,
Georgieva, 2022; Malpass, 2022): one crisis often seems to trigger or worsen another, which then
triggers or worsens yet another; and interacting crises can produce impacts that are both different from
and worse than the harms the crises would have produced separately. These leaders see m to intuit that
the world’s conjoined crises must be understood and addressed as a whole.
The term “polycrisis” captures this intuition. It is being used by a growing number of commentators
(Summers & Ahmed, 2022; Wolf, 2022), international agencies (UNDP, 2022; WEF, 2023; UNICEF, 2023),
policymakers (Juncker, 2018), and scholars (Davies & Hobson, 2022; Tooze, 2021). Yet the term remains
underspecified—a buzzword with little substantive content. It is not yet associated with a rigorous field
of inquiry that includes a framework of precisely defined core concepts and research heuristics that can
sustain disciplined knowledge cumulation (Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970). Without these elements,
“polycrisis” adds little to our understanding; but with these elements, the concept could help scholars
generate actionable insights into the world’s interwoven crises.
In this article, we provide the polycrisis concept with substantive content. We develop a research
agenda for studying the causal mechanisms that entangle multiple global systems and that appear to be
generating near-simultaneous global crises. We argue that a better understanding of humanity’s
predicament as a polycrisis can help the world address its interconnected challenges.
In Section 2, we define “polycrisis” and highlight the concept’s value in comparison with more familiar
concepts. In Section 3, we argue that humanity is facing a global polycrisis; though not our first, it is
unprecedented in crucial respects that we have yet to fully comprehend. Section 4 uses models from the
complexity and sustainability literatures to identify several causal mechanisms likely operating among
global crises today. It introduces two examples to illustrate these mechanisms: first, the cascading
impacts of interactions between the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war, and climate change;
and, second, the potentially reinforcing feedbacks between economic turmoil, nationalist
authoritarianism, and declining international cooperation that could tip the world into mass violence. In
the concluding section, we summarize some of this nascent field’s key insights and policy implications,
while identifying future research directions.
2. What is a (global) polycrisis?
Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern coined the term “polycrisis” over two decades
ago. They argued that the most “vital” problem of the day was not any single threat but the “complex
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intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the
planet” (Morin & Kern, 1999, p. 74). More recently, sustainability scholar Mark Swilling (2013, 2020)
used “polycrisis” to capture the complex interactions between crises in the global political economy that
multiply those crises’ overall impact. In the 2010s, European scholars and leaders (most notably then-
President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker) adopted the term to label the
simultaneous migration, financial, and Brexit crises afflicting Europe (Juncker, 2018; Zeitlin et al., 2019).
And in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Columbia University’s Adam
Tooze and researchers at the Cascade Institute used “polycrisis” to characterize the complex
interactions between the effects of the war, climate change, and the pandemic (Tooze, 2022; Lawrence
et al., 2022).
But it was only at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in January 2023 that the
polycrisis idea gained wide currency among commentators, policymakers, and business elites (Serhan,
2023). This surge in use engendered broad criticism of the concept and, unfortunately, more confusion
than clarity (Homer-Dixon et al., 2023).
Some critics argue that the polycrisis idea obscures the operation of capitalist interests that are at the
root of the world’s woes (Sial, 2023); they associate the term with “Davos elites” and their supposed
faults. Others argue that our present predicament is not truly novel; the world has seen intersecting
crises before, so we do not need a new concept to describe our situation today (Kluth, 2023). And at
least one International Relations scholar has muddied the waters by misrepresenting polycrisis
arguments as “neo-Malthusian”—that is, explanations of complex social phenomena that
overemphasize the causal role of population growth and resource depletion (Drezner, 2023).
Neologisms always provoke contention. But the disputes in this case risk distracting us from a core (and
presumably shared) goal: to better understand and address our world’s very real crises. We believe the
polycrisis concept—if defined clearly and translated into a productive program of research and action—
can help us pursue this goal.
In this spirit, we define a “global polycrisis” as the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global
systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects (Lawrence et al., 2022). We unpack this
definition by first defining “crisis,” then by identifying interactions among crises that constitute a “global
polycrisis,” and finally by distinguishing this latter term from related concepts of “systemic risk,”
“catastrophic risk,” and “existential risk.”
We define a crisis as a sudden (non-linear) event or series of events that significantly harms, in a
relatively short period of time, the wellbeing of a large number of people (Homer-Dixon et al., 2015).
i
More colloquially, it is an extremely harmful emergency that requires urgent response lest even greater
harm ensue. This definition diverges slightly from early and modern understandings of the term: for
ancient Greeks, a crisis was the decisive moment at which an illness veers towards death or recovery; in
modern politics, it is an alarming situation that could steer the course of history and therefore demands
i
We develop this definition further in Section 4. It’s important to note that by this definition, the Cuban Missile Crisis was not
truly a crisis; the event instead created an acute risk of a crisis (i.e., nuclear war) (Homer-Dixon et al., 2015).
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rapid resolution (Koselleck, 2006). Both early and modern usages reference a rupture of normalcy that
has fateful consequences and thus requires decisive action. Modern usage also highlights epochal
change over time (in ways that resonate with our discussion of system stresses in Section 4 below). In
contrast, our definition of crisis emphasizes immediate harms.
Our definition of “crisis” is precise enough to support development of objective criteria of crisis
occurrence and severity. Such criteria could make it harder to use the term selectively and inconsistently
to emphasize some problems and solutions over others and thereby to serve particular interests.
Declaration that a crisis is occurring is often a key step in the securitization of an issue: a problem like
cross-border migration or climate change becomes a crisis, and thus a matter of national security not
because of its inherent features, but because certain actors convince relevant audiences (generally
policymakers) that the issue constitutes an existential threat to the nation and therefore requires
responses outside the realm of normal politics (Buzan et al., 1998, pp. 21-47). Any definition of crisis will
have political implications, but objective criteria (to the extent they can be developed) help limit
politicized manipulation of the term. By referring to facts and evidence about actual—rather than
counterfactual—occurrences, our definition helps to narrow the scope of what can be credibly and
consistently labeled a crisis.
If a crisis is an extremely harmful emergency, then the poly- in polycrisis denotes multiple such events.
But this prefix is of little use if it denotes any coincidence of crises or simply refers to all the world’s ills.
ii
On this point, the concept’s critics are correct. We therefore emphasize crises that are causally inter-
related with one another, and we draw upon the systemic risk literature and systems thinking more
broadly to discern the types of crisis connections that constitute a polycrisis.
Conventional risk assessment focuses on the likelihood and potential harm of particular events such as a
car accident, fire, or bankruptcy. In contrast, systemic risk assessment focuses on “the risk or probability
of breakdowns in an entire system, as opposed to breakdowns in individual parts or components, [as]
evidenced by co-movements (correlations) among most or all parts” (Kaufman & Scott, 2003, p. 371).
Our elaboration of the polycrisis concept here adopts two core implications of this systemic risk idea
(Schweizer, 2021; Renn et al., 2019; Renn, 2016):
1. Intra-systemic impact: A disruption that affects one part or area of a single system quickly
spreads to disturb the entire system (via multiple, ramifying chains of cause and effect, or some
form of contagion, through the system’s causal network).
2. Inter-systemic impact: The disruption of the initial system may spill outside that system’s
boundaries to disrupt other systems.
The concept of systemic risk “assumes a systems perspective” (Schweizer, 2021, p. 79). It presupposes
that “connections between elements of the system” are sufficiently dense that a single disruption can
sometimes generate ramifying impacts throughout the system. It also implies that discernable
ii
Collins Dictionary, for example, defines polycrisis simply as “The simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic
events.”
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boundaries separate one system from another (Figure 1), although discrete systems may influence each
other by exchanging energy, matter, information, and biota (Box 1).
[Figure 1: Global Systems]
Our polycrisis concept similarly assumes that initially limited disruptions can affect an entire system and
then spread to other systems. But it differs from the systemic risk concept in three important ways.
First, whereas the ultimate referent of the systemic risk concept (and of the risk concept more generally)
is the potential harm that might arise, the referent of the polycrisis concept is the realization (or
activation) of chains of cause and effect that cause harms. Second, a systemic risk is generally assumed
to arise from just one or two systems, but a polycrisis (by definition) arises from interactions among
multiple systems.
iii
And finally, whereas the systemic risk literature highlights the complexity of risks
themselves, our approach to polycrisis instead emphasizes the complexity of the systems in which the
risks develop. This complexity creates the possibility for systemic failure and inter-systemic effects; that
is to say, systemic complexity creates systemic risks (Goldin & Mariathasan, 2016; Nyström et al., 2019).
Box 2 presents the key features of global systems that enable polycrises to develop and grow.
By focusing on crises within and across systems, our approach highlights a crucial feature of polycrises:
that the conjoined harms of multiple crises are different from, and generally worse than, the harms each
crisis would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected (Lawrence et al.,
2022, p. 2). What may appear to be separate crises in different systems in fact exacerbate and reshape
one another to form a conjoined polycrisis that must be understood and addressed as a whole. In the
language of complexity scientists, a polycrisis is an emergent phenomenon.
Like systemic risk (ISC et al., 2022), a polycrisis can occur at different scales—local, national, regional, or
global—indeed at any scale that hosts interacting systems. Here, however, we are particularly
concerned with crises interacting at the global scale, with a spatial extent that affects the whole planet
and/or all of humanity.
iv
Global polycrises (and global systemic risks) arise from the organization of
human activities into complex global systems (as defined in Figure 1) structured in ways that enable
disruptions to spread quickly around the world (as outlined in Box 2).
Box 1: Vectors and conduits of global polycrises
iii
Technically, by this definition, a polycrisis could involve just two systems in crisis. But such a pairing can be effectively
analyzed without invoking the polycrisis concept. Interactions among three or more interconnected systems are far more
difficult to analyze, however, because the number of combinatorial possibilities explodes. The polycrisis concept permits better
conceptualization of complex interactions between a multiplicity of crises, as in the examples presented in Section 4.
iv
While other authors refer to “the” polycrisis, as a singular phenomenon, multiple polycrises could conceivably occur
simultaneously but separately, each in a different set of systems. Each and every crisis is certainly not connected to each and
every other crisis in a significant way, and the polycrisis concept should not be overextended to encompass every problem
afflicting humanity. At the same time, the dense interconnectivity between global systems creates numerous pathways for
crises to intersect. While multiple global polycrises could occur simultaneously but separately, we speculate that their
interconnections will grow over time, and if these crises are not resolved, they will likely amalgamate into a single polycrisis.
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At a rudimentary level, four vectors can carry a crisis within and across systems and from one part of the
world to another, thereby inflicting significant harms:
• Energy, such as the kinetic energy generated by earthquakes and hurricanes.
• Matter, such as the toxins and pollutants that harm organisms and ecosystems.
• Information, consisting of instructions and symbolic representations—including genetic and digital
codes, news feeds, ideologies, money, policies, and laws—that can be communicated between
agents.
• Biota, such as viruses, bacteria, and other organisms that can disrupt the biological and
physiological functions of other organisms. (This category may be considered a special combination
of energy, matter, and information that involves lifeforms.)
Any given crisis event will likely feature some combination of these vectors, whether simultaneously or
sequentially. A hurricane, for example disperses kinetic energy through wind and rain, which can cause
matter in the form of floodwater to inundate populated areas and create conditions for the spread of
pathogenic biota; while information about the disaster may provoke panicked, inappropriate responses.
Crises may stem either from vectors that carry harms or from sudden disruptions of vectors that carry
necessities, as when energy outages leave households vulnerable to harsh winters. Social power can be
understood as an actor’s ability to manipulate these vectors to get another actor to do what they
otherwise would not do (Dahl, 1957), in ways that can create a crisis by intention, negligence, or
accident.
Today’s planet-spanning webs of connections—including those arising from Earth’s biophysical features
and others produced by humanity’s globalized economic activity—provide the conduits through which
these vectors travel around the globe. This web of connections includes our societies’
telecommunication networks; pipeline networks and electrical grids; roads, canals, and air and shipping
routes; supply chains and trade, finance, and monetary systems; and links among elements of Earth’s
climate and ecological systems. [End of Box 1]
Box 2: Properties of global systems that enable polycrises
Operating together, the vectors and conduits described in Box 1 create highly complex global systems.
These systems exhibit five key properties that help generate polycrises while hampering crisis
mitigation.
• Multiple causes: The operation of many causes simultaneously makes cause and effect
relationships difficult to trace and presents decisionmakers with acute policy trade-offs. Causes
may also interact synergistically so that their combined effects are qualitatively different than the
sum of effects they would have separately (Jervis, 1997).
• Non-linearity: Complex global systems exhibit nonlinear behavior—that is, perturbations of such
systems can produce disproportionately large (or small) changes in the system’s behavior. An
important source of nonlinearity is the existence of multiple stable states or equilibria that are
separated by thresholds. A system can flip from one equilibrium to another (a critical transition or
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tipping event) when feedbacks in key processes that sustain the system’s equilibrium shift from
negative to positive—i.e., from self-dampening to self-reinforcing causal loops (Scheffer, 2009).
Tipping events can also result from interactions between adjacent systems (Rocha et al., 2018).
• Hysteresis: System flips are generally not reversible; a return to the previous system equilibrium is
often impossible.
• Boundary permeability: Casual processes operate on multiple time scales within and among
natural, social, and technological systems; they cross boundaries of administrative and political
units and social sectors, while requiring integrated knowledge from diverse scientific disciplines.
• “Black swan” outcomes: The probability density functions describing the distribution of events
generated by complex global systems are rarely normal (i.e., Gaussian); they often have long tails,
indicating a non-negligible risk of extreme outcomes. Leaders, in contrast, face institutional
pressures to concentrate on immediate and probable risks.
These five properties create deep uncertainty that profoundly hinders effective management of
outcomes. Multiple causes and nonlinearity weaken decisionmakers’ ability to predict which policy
changes will matter when. Tipping events and hysteresis undermine trial-and-error learning; a
maladaptive behavior can generate benefits until a threshold is crossed, at which point costs are
unavoidable, damage irreversible, and any learning too late. Ineffective learning then lowers the public’s
willingness to accept costs to lessen risk (Barrett & Dannenberg, 2014).
Because risks arising within complex global systems tend to transcend administrative, social, and
scientific boundaries, they often exceed managers’ professional expertise and are consequently
downplayed or even ignored. And when crises affect multiple administrative and political domains,
actors may choose to free ride on others’ investments in solutions. Finally, deep uncertainty fosters
competing policy prescriptions, aggravating a pernicious loss of trust in governments’ problem-solving
capacity. In some cases, uncertainty can be reduced; in others, it is either practically or intrinsically
irreducible (Janzwood, 2022; Walker et al., 2003). [End of Box 2]
In the interest of establishing a research agenda, we have adopted a harm threshold that remains
somewhat ambiguous and hence leaves room for future refinements. In the extreme, a polycrisis could
reach the severity of a “catastrophic risk,” an event that kills 10 to 25 percent of humanity (Cotton-
Barratt et al., 2016; Kemp et al., 2022) or brings about the collapse of human civilization (GCRI, 2023). It
could even become an “existential risk” that extinguishes humanity entirely. But a polycrisis, by our
definition, does not need to reach these levels of harm; and, in contrast to accounts of individual
existential and catastrophic threats (arising from, for instance, an asteroid hitting Earth), a polycrisis
necessarily involves multiple crisis events. It could involve massive immediate casualties, but also a
widespread and sustained decline in the quality of life into the future.
Based on these considerations, we define a global polycrisis as the causal entanglement of crises in
multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. The causal interactions
between constituent crises are significant enough to produce emergent harms that are different from,
and usually greater than, the sum of the harms they would produce separately. Consequently, these
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crises must be addressed as a whole; they cannot be resolved individually. While our approach to
polycrisis incorporates key aspects of other definitions, it is specifically intended to aid scientific
research into the nature of polycrisis by emphasizing the causal interactions that connect global systems
and spread crises among them. Our definition relates to other important concepts (such as systemic
risk) but adds essential novelty by highlighting the causal entanglement of multiple crises—
interconnections that abound but remain sparsely understood, as explained in the sections below.
3. Are we in a global polycrisis?
We argue here that the world is currently experiencing a global polycrisis and that this situation is
worsening. Constituent crises include: the lingering health, social, and economic effects of the Covid-19
pandemic; stagflation (a persistent combination of inflation and low growth); volatility in global food
and energy markets; geopolitical conflict, especially between assertive authoritarian regimes (including
China and Russia) and the democratic West, which is leading to a partial decoupling of American and
Chinese economies; political instability and civil unrest in countries both rich and poor arising from
economic insecurity, ideological extremism, political polarization, and declining institutional legitimacy;
and increasingly frequent and devastating weather events generated by climate heating. These crises
are destroying livelihoods and lives around the globe and are undoubtedly diminishing humanity’s
prospects. Moreover, they are certainly interconnected, although exactly how remains unclear.
This is not humanity’s first polycrisis. We experienced at least two additional instances in the last half
century, though some may argue they were not truly global. The oil shocks of the 1970s arose from
conflicts in the Middle East and generated severe international energy shortages that contributed to,
and interacted with, stagflation in the world economy (Progressive International, 2023). The 2008-09
global financial crisis intersected with oil supply constraints and long-term stresses in food production to
produce cascading bankruptcies, food price hikes, and political unrest worldwide (Homer-Dixon et al.,
2015; Biggs et al., 2011).
v
While the present polycrisis features some of the same constituent crises—including energy and food
shocks, stagflation, and financial instability—it is unprecedented in crucial ways (Homer-Dixon, 2023;
Lähde, 2023). First, the world is far more interconnected now than it was during the OPEC oil shocks.
Between 1980 and 2020, air freight increased six-fold to 180 billion-ton-kilometers per year, the number
of air passengers nearly tripled to 1.8 billion annually, and internet usage increased from virtually zero
to sixty percent of the world’s population. Meanwhile, the total value of world merchandise trade
increased twelve-fold between 1980 and 2022 to nearly 25 trillion US dollars annually (at current prices),
and container port traffic has more than tripled since 2000 to almost 800 million 20-foot-equivalent-
units in 2020.
vi
v
Beyond these two recent global examples, history provides many instances of polycrises at the regional scale, such as the
trauma that accompanied Europe’s “little ice age” of the seventeenth century, which devastated harvests and generated mass
migrations, but laid some key foundations of modernity (Blom, 2019), and the natural disasters, foreign invasions, political
upheavals, and trade disruptions that produced the collapse of Late Bronze Age Eurasian civilizations in the 12th century BC
(Cline, 2014). For more historical examples, see: Hoyer et al., 2023.
vi
Based on statistics from the World Bank’s DataBank (https://databank.worldbank.org/home.aspx) and UNCTADstat
(https://unctadstat.unctad.org/EN/Index.html).
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The “conduits” of this extreme connectivity—aircraft, container carriers, fiber-optic cables, and the
like—now carry immense circum-planetary flows of the “vectors” of matter, energy, biota, and
information (Box 1). The conduits also create and sustain multi-continental markets and globalized
corporations that in turn encourage increasing standardization and homogenization among system
elements, from financial instruments to germ plasm for agricultural goods to computer operating
systems and social media platforms. This homogenization then enables even denser interconnection, in
a powerful positive feedback.
Unfortunately, complex systems that feature both high connectivity and high homogeneity among
system elements can be especially prone to rapid, discontinuous change (Scheffer et al., 2012), much as
closely planted agricultural monocrops are susceptible to devastation by pathogens. By striving to
maximize efficiency and open access to markets while stripping away social and environmental
safeguards, neoliberal arrangements have exacerbated both homogenization and hyper-connectivity in
the global economy, generating recurrent crises and worsening stresses both in the economy (for
instance, by increasing inequality) and in other systems (for instance, by damaging the ecosphere).
Even in the absence of high homogenization, gradual shifts in exogenous conditions can erode a highly
connected system’s resilience until its stabilizing feedbacks are overwhelmed, and it flips to a different
equilibrium (Scheffer, 2009). And systems that may be resilient on their own can become more
vulnerable to such flips when they become tightly connected to other systems (Buldyrev et al., 2010;
Gao et al., 2015); unexpected vulnerabilities can arise when system elements not designed to work
together are inadvertently connected (Perrow, 1999).
In sum, the interlinked architecture of our global systems is at the heart of the current polycrisis,
because it worsens risks as diverse as financial turmoil, pandemics, economic inequality, and ideological
extremism (Centeno et al., 2015; Helbing, 2013; Rodrik, 2011). These systemic risks are “endemic to
globalization”; they can be managed (by reforming the neoliberal economic order, for instance) but not
eliminated (Goldin & Mariathasan, 2016, p. xiii).
The present polycrisis is also unprecedented in a second respect. Human resource consumption and
pollution output are pushing Earth’s physical and ecological systems far from their previous equilibria,
imperiling the stability of many other global systems critical to human wellbeing, from food production
to international security. For instance, our emissions of greenhouse gases have created an energy
imbalance at the planet’s surface (more heat coming in from space than going out) of about 1.36 Watts
per square metre (Hansen et al., 2023). This extra energy—now equivalent to nearly one million
Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs exploded in the atmosphere every day—is producing increasingly
extreme storms, floods, heat waves, and droughts, affecting billions of people and worsening population
displacement, social instability, and conflict (Adelphi & PIK, 2020; Ide et al., 2020; Schleussner et al.,
2016).
Together, hyper-connectivity and the destabilization of ecospheric systems are amplifying and
accelerating crisis events worldwide (Figure 2). For example, since HIV first appeared four decades ago,
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outbreaks of zoonotic viral disease have become increasingly severe and frequent, from the SARS
outbreak of 2002 to H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2015, Ebola again in 2018,
Covid-19 in 2019, and most recently mpox and Marburg (Araf et al., 2023; CFR, 2023; Smith et al., 2014).
Meanwhile, climate heating is also accelerating: between 1970 and 2010, Earth’s tropospheric
temperature increased about 0.18°C per decade; between 2010 and 2040, warming is predicted to
increase to 0.27°C per decade, a rise in rate of 50 percent (Hansen et al., 2023, p. 21). And because this
warming makes zoonotic disease outbreaks more likely, two seemingly discrete crises—pandemics and
calamitous weather—are becoming increasingly entwined (Carlson et al., 2022).
[Figure 2: Crisis amplification and acceleration]
But global crises are not just amplifying and accelerating, they also appear to be synchronizing. “We’re
seeing what occurs when everything happens everywhere all at once,” says International Relations
theorist Stephen Walt (2022). Complex and largely unrecognized causal links among the world’s
economic, social, and ecological systems seem to be causing many risks to go critical at the same time or
in quick succession (Figure 3). Indeed, “the failure to take into account feedbacks across systems” is a
crucial emerging risk itself (Future Earth, 2020, p. 6).
While scientific knowledge of individual systemic risks like climate change and zoonotic viral disease is
often deep, our grasp of causal mechanisms linking these risks and the crises they generate remains
shallow (ISC et al., 2022, p. 8). For instance, the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report
identifies apparent links among risks but does not examine amplifying feedbacks in detail. Below,
therefore, we offer an analytical framework to help advance our understanding of the causal
mechanisms driving the present polycrisis.
[Figure 3: Crisis synchronization]
4. The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement
“Synchronization” can mean several things. In physics, synchronization occurs when interactions
between oscillating objects cause them to align their rhythms so that events happen at the same time or
with the same periodicity (Pikovsky et al., 2007). Synchronization often homogenizes behavior by
causing system elements to act in the same way, as when glow bugs flash in unison or investors all try to
sell off bad stocks at the same time (Strogatz, 2003). And the term synchronization may be used more
loosely to refer to events that occur in quick succession.
The apparent synchronization of global crises (in any of the above senses) raises a crucial question: what
sorts of interactions and feedbacks are aligning crises in multiple global systems? These relationships
remain opaque and underexplored. We therefore propose an analytical framework to guide
investigation of the causal mechanisms connecting global crises.
The basic model: Crisis in a single system
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Scholars and policymakers tend to silo their analyses of, and responses to, crises; that is, they tend to
see the causes and effects of a given crisis through the lens of a single system. Such parsimony can be a
useful analytical starting point. Beginning, therefore, with a single system, our basic model (Figure 4)
proposes that a crisis occurs when one or more slow-moving stresses interact with a fast-moving trigger
event to push the system out of its established equilibrium and into a state of disequilibrium or
instability.
vii
In line with our earlier definition of crisis (Section 2), this disequilibrium manifests itself as a
sudden (non-linear) event or series of events that significantly harms a large number of people.
[Figure 4: Basic model of systemic crisis]
A complex system is not static. Constantly operating internal processes (such as negative feedbacks)
keep the system’s state (represented in Figure 4B as a ball) within a certain range of values (depicted as
a “basin of attraction” in a “stability landscape”). Stresses are slow-moving processes—pressures,
emerging contradictions, and deepening vulnerabilities—that accumulate in the system over time and
weaken its stabilizing feedbacks, reducing their ability to hold the system’s state within its established
range.
viii
Metaphorically, the basin in which the system resides becomes shallower.
Stresses often operate at the global scale, and because they are slow-moving, their change over time is
usually somewhat predictable. In global systems, stresses currently include growing socio-economic
inequalities, increasing resource scarcities, economic over-leveraging, climate heating, and ecological
degradation, among many others. By reshaping the stability landscape, these stresses shift the
probabilities of future global developments and create systemic risks—that is, potential pathways across
that landscape to crisis.
A trigger event is a fast-moving process that interacts with stresses to push a system state out of
equilibrium. If stresses have made the system’s basin of attraction shallower, a trigger event of a given
magnitude will more easily cause such disequilibrium. Trigger events are usually stochastic,
unpredictable, and local or regional in scale, but they have global-systemic consequences. They include
phenomena like political uprisings, price spikes in critical goods and services, major corporate
bankruptcies, and the loss of keystone species in specific ecosystems.
A system enters crisis when it leaves its established basin of attraction. A crisis thus has three defining
properties: the system state is unstable (i.e., out of equilibrium), the change in system state occurs
relatively suddenly, and the resulting instability causes significant human harm. Pushed from
equilibrium, the system is in a turbulent state that disrupts stabilizing mechanisms and generates
vii
For our purposes, slow-moving (long-term) processes can be measured (roughly) in years and decades, while fast-moving
(short-term) processes (or “events”) can be measured in days and months.
viii
Pressures are forces that accumulate over long periods of time until they are suddenly released, as when tectonic stresses
produce earthquakes, or a long-aggrieved community erupts in revolt. Contradictions involve conflicting and often self-
undermining forces within a system, such as the tendency of the neoliberal global economy to produce economic and
ecospheric disruptions that threaten the social and environmental stability on which it depends. And vulnerabilities concern the
potential pathways to systemic failure that a system develops as it grows more complex, as when the tight-coupling and
homogeneity of the financial system enables a cascading global financial crisis.
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harmful outcomes, such as loss of income or deaths and injuries from violent conflict, malnutrition,
starvation, or disease.
A crisis ends when the system returns to equilibrium—by either re-entering its original basin of
attraction or moving to a new one. If the system state returns to its original basin and that basin remains
shallow, a crisis will likely erupt again. If the system state settles into a new basin of attraction, it has
completed a critical transition; it has flipped from one set of system behaviors to another with its own
stabilizing internal processes.
Ideally, a crisis ends with the system entering a basin that reinforces normatively beneficial system
behaviors and which is sufficiently deep (i.e., stable) to prevent another crisis. But the system could also
enter a harmful and undesirable—but still highly stable—basin, perhaps one with widespread economic
deprivation and political repression. In these circumstances, it is the system’s newfound stability in a
pernicious state, rather than its crisis instability, that creates significant harm.
ix
For example, systems
such as slavery and imperialism caused immense suffering over long historical periods—not as crises,
but due to their lamentable stability and resilience.
The global financial crisis of 2008-9 illustrates our basic model. It arose from the conjunction of several
slow-process stresses, including growing worldwide trade in opaque financial instruments securitized by
overvalued housing markets, and tightening balance-sheet interdependencies among major financial
institutions stemming from cross-ownership of these instruments. The collapse of Lehman Brothers was
the trigger event that started a cascade of defaults. The crisis ended when central banks rescued major
commercial banks from default, slashed interest rates, and injected unprecedented amounts of liquidity
into national economies. The global economic system settled into a new disinflationary equilibrium of
weak demand, low growth, and exceptionally low interest rates that lasted until the Covid-19 pandemic.
Through this entire period and up to the present, the global economy has continued to experience
additional powerful stresses—including rising economic inequality within most nations and worsening
global heating—that have progressively weakened its social and ecological foundations and contributed
to a long-term fall in the secular rate of global economic growth (Homer-Dixon, 2020, p. 204). These
(and other—see, for example, Roubini, 2022) changes amount to a steady shallowing of global
capitalism’s basin of attraction that is boosting the risk of future systemic crises.
No conceptual schema can fully capture the intricate causal, spatial, and temporal features of specific
global crises. But our basic single-system model should help researchers distinguish between the three
core elements of stress, trigger, and crisis and then map interactions among these elements. Figure 5
shows possible types of within-system interaction.
[Figure 5: Crisis interactions within a single system]
ix
Stated differently, all crises involve harms, but not all harms arise from crises. The instability condition captures the fas t-
moving nature of crises as abrupt (non-linear) departures from normalcy, allowing for the fact that normalcy (i.e., a state of
non-crisis) too may be harmful.
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Crisis interaction between multiple systems
A global polycrisis, however, is characterized by relationships between systems. In Figure 6, we show
how the elements of our basic model (stresses, triggers, and crises) can interact among multiple
systems.
[Figure 6: Crisis interactions between multiple systems]
The possible inter-systemic interactions shown in Figure 6 draw upon—and echo—advances in
ecological research. Just as other scholars and policy makers tend to address crises in single systems,
ecologists have largely studied critical transitions in isolated ecosystems. But recent, leading-edge work
in ecology identifies causal relationships between such transitions in multiple ecosystems (Rocha et al.,
2018; Klose et al., 2021; Keys et al., 2019).
Rocha et al. (2018) compare the thirty ecosystem critical transitions mapped in the Regime Shifts
Database
x
and identify three broad types of causal relationships between them:
xi
• Common stresses: A common stress may weaken the resilience of multiple systems, or the
stresses affecting one system may interact with stresses in another, as depicted in Figure 6A.
• Domino effects: A crisis in one system may affect the stresses in another system, cause a
triggering event that pushes another system into crisis, or reshape a crisis in another system, as
depicted in Figures 6E and 6F. Domino effects operate in temporal sequence.
• Inter-systemic feedbacks: Stresses, trigger events, and other events generated by a crisis can
form feedback loops that either dampen or, more commonly, escalate crises in two or more
systems. Feedback effects can be depicted by combinations of the processes shown in Figure 6,
as illustrated in Figure 7.
We propose additional possibilities: “common triggers” by which the same event can activate crises in
multiple systems (Figure 6B), as well as possible causal interactions between stresses in different system
(Figure 6C) and stresses in one system that generate trigger events in another system (Figure 6D). All six
forms of interaction depicted in Figure 6 can be thought of as ideal types; together they provide a
“grammar” of causal interactions between systems that can be used to develop hypotheses in polycrisis
research. The remainder of this section provides further applications and examples.
[Figure 7: An example of interactions between multiple systems]
Common stresses and systemic synchronization
x
See: https://www.regimeshifts.org.
xi
We have adjusted the terms Rocha et al. use to make them consistent with our crisis model; we have changed “shared
drivers” to “common stresses” and “hidden feedbacks” to “inter-systemic feedbacks.”
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Many global systems are currently undergoing radical change; this simultaneity of change is probably
not coincidental. It suggests common stresses are causing synchronization of underlying system
behavior (Figure 6A), which may account (at least in part) for the acceleration, amplification, and
apparent synchronization of today’s global crises.
• The Earth environmental system is leaving its Holocene equilibrium and entering a period of
instability due to anthropogenic perturbation of the climate and other physical and ecological
systems (Armstrong McKay et al., 2022; Rockström et al., 2021; Steffen et al., 2018; Barnosky et
al., 2012). This instability is already causing enormous human harm, and its effects could
become catastrophic in the near future (Xu et al., 2020; Kemp et al., 2022).
• The global human energy system has begun to shift away from its dependence on fossil fuels.
Whether this shift will culminate in a new zero-carbon energy equilibrium is uncertain:
technological bottlenecks and incumbent opposition may block its progress. The shift’s
economic benefits are also uncertain: it could ultimately force humanity to decrease its energy
consumption per capita (Hall, 2018; Smil, 2022).
• The international security system is changing from a world order based on American leadership
(a “pax Americana”) towards an uncertain and likely less-stable multipolar order defined by the
rise of China and the diffusion of power to a much wider range of actors (Gilpin, 2002; Ikenberry,
2014; Nye, 2011). Historically, such transitions have been accompanied more often than not by
major war (Allison, 2017; Gilpin, 1988).
• The global economic system is shifting from a neoliberal economic regime—one undermining
itself through worsening instability, inequality, and ecospheric externalities—to a yet
indeterminate regime, but one likely involving increased dirigisme and economic integration
within ideological blocs (Rodrik, 2019; Birdsall & Fukuyama, 2011; Monbiot, 2016; Rodrik, 2011).
• The information system is being revolutionized by artificial intelligence, with unclear but likely
unprecedented implications for employment, decision making, and personal, national, and
global security.
The simultaneity of radical change across these systems likely arises, in significant part, from their
interdependence, as we argued in section 3 above. Stresses affecting one system can create (or
constitute) stresses in others (Figures 6A and 6C). Stresses in the global energy system, for example,
include the declining thermodynamic quality of remaining fossil fuel deposits, a trend that increases the
energy cost (and therefore carbon emissions) of extraction. Fossil fuel emissions then create stresses in
the Earth system, such as climate heating and ecosystem disruption. But possibilities for substituting
other, zero-carbon energy sources remain limited (Hall, 2018). Most alternatives, for instance, have
relatively low power density, which makes them ill-suited as primary energy sources for today’s high
power-density-of-consumption urban regions and manufacturing facilities (Smil, 2016). Fossil fuels also
still provide energy for nearly all long-distance transportation and remain essential to steel, cement,
plastic, and fertilizer production (Smil, 2022, pp. 76-102). Stresses in the global energy system thus
create stresses in global food, transportation, and economic systems.
Additionally, stresses in one global system can stimulate or constrain reorganization in others. For
example, the Earth system’s post-Holocene transformation is influencing change in the global energy
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system and thereby the global economic system. Hegemonic competition in the international security
system could reduce governmental collaboration to reorganize the global energy system so as to reduce,
in turn, that system’s impacts on the Earth system.
A framework called adaptive cycle theory suggests that a number of global systems may be on the cusp
of catastrophic reorganization. Global energy, food, and financial systems have become increasingly
complex, and their sub-components increasingly specialized and connected, as firms have competed to
maximize productivity and efficiency. These changes have made these systems more rigid and less
resilient in some respects. Systems exhibiting such characteristics, adaptive cycle theory argues, are
susceptible to breakdown and reorganization (Gunderson & Holling, 2002; Holling, 2001). When multiple
systems align at this phase of the cycle—as several global systems appear to be doing now—breakdown
in one may trigger breakdowns in others.
Domino effects between global systems
Such a cascade of breakdowns across systems would be an example of domino effects. The domino
metaphor implies a linear chain of cause and effect, in which one crisis causes another, and so on. The
interactions between global crises are, of course, not so simple. Stresses and triggers can interact across
systems (Figures 6C and 6D); a crisis in one system may affect the stresses and/or the trigger events that
push another system into crisis (Figure 6E); and the events generated by one crisis may influence the
behavior of another system in crisis (Figure 6F). These types of interactions combine across multiple
systems to form multicausal networks, in contrast to simple causal chains.
Figure 8 illustrates domino effects by mapping a causal network of stresses, triggers, and crises among
several global systems—specifically, the health, environmental, economic, transportation, international
security, and social order and governance systems—from the past through the present to possible (and
somewhat speculative) outcomes in the future. The left-to-right temporal logic of such maps helpfully
traces the course of events, but it cannot capture the recursive feedback loops that powerfully drive
synchronization. Those feedbacks are illustrated instead by the causal loop diagrams in Figure 9.
[Figure 8: Domino effects in the global polycrisis]
Inter-systemic feedback loops
Domino effects are one-way causal relationships. But system behaviors can sometimes influence their
own causes, creating feedback loops. Negative (i.e., dampening) feedbacks tend to stabilize systems by
counteracting change, such as when markets correct for overvalued assets. Positive (i.e., self-amplifying)
feedbacks involve two or more variables that intensify one another in spirals of run-away growth or
decay, such as arms races or stock market crashes.
We argue that feedbacks arise from combinations of the interactions depicted in Figure 6 and produce
the crisis synchronization manifested in a polycrisis. Although one crisis may on occasion dampen
another—as when, for example, a stock market crash produces a communication system outage that
slows herd behavior—the real danger arises when interactions among two crises’ causes and effects
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create a positive feedback in which each crisis keeps worsening the other. Positive feedbacks can quickly
overwhelm institutional safeguards and controls. And they can create an acute policymaking dilemma in
which one crisis cannot be resolved without remediating a second one—but the second cannot be
resolved without remediating the first.
Figure 9 illustrates several harmful positive feedbacks that appear to be forming today within and
between the global systems identified in Figure 1. Compared to Figure 8, which shows how stresses,
triggers, and crises can cascade unidirectionally over time, Figure 9 illustrates the back-and-forth (or
cyclical) interactions between crises, triggers, and stresses.
[Figure 9: Inter-systemic feedback loops in the global polycrisis]
In Figure 9A, economic turmoil arising, for instance, from inflation, financial crisis, and debt—or perhaps
due to scarcities of key resources such as energy, food, water, and raw materials—creates mass
grievances and institutional opportunities for populist leaders to capture political power and weaken the
rule of law. These leaders’ actions to establish authoritarian regimes simultaneously draw on and
amplify nationalist, chauvinistic, and anti-globalization ideologies, often by scapegoating foreigners,
cosmopolitan elites, and internal minorities. Although their efforts to decouple the national economy
from the world economy generally worsen internal economic turmoil, this turmoil, paradoxically, often
exacerbates the grievances and opportunities the leaders can exploit to consolidate their power (by
blaming “foreign elements” or “internal enemies” for the economic crisis). In the last decade, this
feedback has operated in such diverse countries as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Russia, Turkey, Zimbabwe,
Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.
In Figure 9B, we show that populist authoritarian regimes espousing nationalist and anti-globalization
ideologies generally decrease their participation in international institutions, reduce their international
cooperation, and focus their attention and resources inward. They thus diminish opportunities for
mutually beneficial economic exchange and forego the benefits of globalization, which can worsen both
internal and global economic turmoil.
In Figure 9C, we indicate that, in the decades ahead, less international cooperation will perhaps fatally
weaken international action to slow climate change. More frequent and severe extreme weather events
will then trigger flows of migrants towards richer countries (Lustgarten, 2020; Xu et al., 2020), an influx
that is likely to increase support for chauvinistic and isolationist ideologies in receiving societies. The
resulting exacerbation of economic turmoil could ultimately propel out-migration from these countries.
Finally, Figure 9D shows that the chauvinistic reaction to mass migration is likely to precipitate violence
against those seeking refuge and those deemed too sympathetic towards outsiders. Meanwhile,
extreme weather events could worsen intercommunal tensions, trigger state collapse and civil war, and
increase the probability of international conflicts over scarce resources, including water and food. Civil
violence and interstate war tend to deepen nationalism while generating new waves of refugees and
exacerbating economic turmoil. These pernicious feedbacks are certainly not inevitable; but if they were
to take hold they would escalate all of the problems depicted in Figure 9 in a catastrophic spiral.
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Mapping dominos and loops
The two mapping techniques illustrated above—one focusing on domino effects and the other on inter-
systemic feedback loops—complement each other and together enable a distinctly network-based
approach to crisis analysis. They help researchers identify those nodes (stresses, triggers, or crises) that
are most influential—that affect many other nodes in the network—and those that are most
vulnerable—that are most affected by other nodes (Low, 2021).
xii
In Figure 8, inflation is particularly
vulnerable in this sense, while the pandemic is highly influential. Many of the feedback loops presented
in Figure 9 travel through the nationalism and anti-globalization node, suggesting that people’s
ideological reactions to change will play a highly influential role in shaping future outcomes.
Network maps of global crises are not entirely new, of course. The World Economic Forum’s (WEF)
annual Global Risk Report has included similar diagrams since 2007 (WEF, 2007, p. 13). Most recently,
the 2023 report (WEF, 2023) identifies “state collapse,” “erosion of social cohesion,” “collapse of a
systemically important supply chain,” “interstate conflict,” and “cost-of-living crisis” as the most
influential global risks (i.e., those most connected to other global risks).
Although WEF’s diagrams provide useful insights into the architecture of the current global polycrisis,
the Forum acknowledges their limitations. For one thing, the diagrams’ links depict only positive
correlations between risks—that is, about the likelihood that certain risks will appear together—not
actual causal connections between them.
xiii
Neither do the diagrams convey information about negative
correlations, where the occurrence of certain risks diminishes the likelihood of others (WEF, 2008, p.
25). Also, network maps like those presented by the WEF provide a static snapshot of risk connections at
a particular moment; they do not reveal how risks and their connections change over time as crises
occur and activate other risks. Finally, the data underlying the WEF diagrams are derived from surveys of
leaders and experts in the business community. But when scientists were asked to appraise the same
global risks, they generally judged them to be more likely and harmful than did the WEF’s respondents
(Future Earth, 2020; Future Earth et al., 2021; Garschagen et al., 2020).
To address these challenges, the emerging polycrisis research program should prioritize methodological
innovation that uses valid and reliable measures of key variables to identify the actual casual
mechanisms linking stresses, triggers, and crises.
5. Conclusion: A polycrisis research program and lessons for
policy
xii
In network analysis, the term “degree” refers to the number of links (connections) a given node has, which can be further
divided into incoming and outgoing flows (in-degree and out-degree, respectively). High out-degree nodes have more influence
on other nodes, while high in-degree nodes are more vulnerable to developments elsewhere in the network.
xiii
We adopt a non-Humean ontology of causation that presumes causation is more than just observed patterns of
correlation and requires real physical mechanisms linking cause and effect.
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We argue that the world is experiencing a worsening polycrisis and propose a conceptual framework for
understanding how crises (and their precursor stresses and triggers) become entangled across global
systems. This framework will help researchers identify and study the causal mechanisms that produce
crisis amplification, acceleration, and synchronization.
We thus place the polycrisis concept at the centre of an urgent new research program. This program can
draw on theories and methods in other fields to explain the dynamics of crisis interaction. Complexity
science provides theories explaining critical transitions (Scheffer, 2009), path dependence (Pierson,
2004), stability landscapes (Folke et al., 2010; Walker et al., 2004), and the underlying sources of
complexity (Arthur, 1993). Network science elucidates the structure of connectivity within global
systems, including the interactions between networks (Buldyrev et al., 2010; Gao et al., 2015). And
process tracing (a method of historical analysis in the social sciences) allows researchers to discern
causal mechanisms in situations where controlled-case comparisons are impossible (George and
Bennett, 2005, pp. 205-32), as when observed crisis interactions are historically unprecedented.
Targeted empirical research investigating specific crisis interactions can guide policymakers and other
actors seeking to navigate the polycrisis. Our analysis points to three broad policy implications.
Focus on crisis interactions, not isolated crises: Governments tend to focus on individual and
immediate threats, which often renders their management of systemic risks ineffective (ISC et al., 2022,
p. 8). Because today’s crises are causally entangled, they can be neither fully understood nor addressed
in isolation from one another. A comprehensive approach is necessary—an “integrated assessment” of
the full range of interlinked crises involved—especially when policies that address one crisis might
worsen or undermine efforts to resolve others (Baum & Barrett, 2018).
Address system architecture, not just events: The polycrisis concept also highlights the role of densely
interconnected global systems as the conduits that transmit the causes and effects of cascading crises.
Policymakers must work to change system structures that generate such hazards. They can, for instance,
strengthen negative (dampening) feedbacks that counteract pernicious positive feedbacks. In some
cases, they might reduce connectivity or create buffers (or firebreaks) at sites of systemic vulnerability.
Recent efforts to more heavily regulate financial institutions designated as systemically important show
that governments and international agencies are starting to internalize this principle. But much more
can be done to protect technological infrastructure (by increasing the resilience of vital communications
systems to electrical grid and satellite failures, for instance), strengthen food systems (by buffering
against the risk of simultaneous breadbasket failures (Gaupp et al., 2020)), and reduce pandemics arising
from zoonotic spillover (by limiting wet markets, bushmeat consumption, and the illegal wildlife trade).
Broadly speaking, policymakers should consider resilience alongside efficiency when evaluating policy
outcomes, which means encouraging policy diversity, experimentation, and redundancy—all elements
of adaptive management.
Exploit high-leverage intervention points: Many of the same features of complex systems that create
polycrises also provide opportunities for systemic transformations toward more desirable futures. When
systems are prone to non-linearities, positive feedbacks, and critical transitions, a relatively small action
may have a profound effect, if it is tailored to the system’s features (Meadows & Wright, 2008, pp. 145-
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65; Otto et al., 2020; Lenton et al., 2022). Network-based polycrisis visualization and analysis can help
identify such intervention points.
The polycrisis concept—if effectively grounded in a scientific research program focused on practical
steps to improve policy outcomes—can help us better address the world’s interlinked crises. It can
inform strategies to prevent the amplification, acceleration, and synchronization of crises and to
respond when polycrises occur. But this research program needs to start now. “Business as usual,” says
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, “could result in breakdown of the global order, into
a world of perpetual crisis and winner-takes-all” (Guterres, 2021).
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Figure 1: Global systems
Following Donella Meadows (2008), a system is a collection of elements whose connections create some
sort of whole with its own qualities. In “global” systems, these three aspects extend over virtually all of
humanity and/or the planet. The elements of global systems include agents (such as species, individuals,
and organizations) and physical infrastructure (from server farms to ice sheets to cities). In human social
systems, elements may also include such entities as worldviews (beliefs about how the world is and how
it ought to be), institutions (rules of appropriate behavior), and technologies (procedures for directing
physical phenomena to human purposes) (Beddoe et al., 2009). Connections between these elements
are their circumplanetary exchanges of energy, material, information, and biota (the “vectors” discussed
in Box 1) through the “conduits” outlined in Box 1.
The eight global systems presented here are defined, as “wholes,” by the functions they perform in
global life. We offer them as one plausible schema by which to disaggregate a messy reality for the
purpose of polycrisis analysis. The notion that crises can travel across global systems presumes that we
can identify distinct global systems, but discerning their boundaries remains a challenge, because
complex systems are, by definition, open to exchanges with their environment; they change and co-
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evolve, which is (in part) what makes the concept of polycrisis so salient. Figure design by Jacob Buurma,
Vibrant Content.
Figure 2: Crisis amplification and acceleration
This waveform diagram metaphorically illustrates the distinction between amplification and acceleration
processes. The wave’s increasing amplitude (increasing height and depth of peaks) and increasing
frequency (decreasing space between peaks) represent, respectively, the amplification and acceleration
of system perturbations. Event peaks that pass certain harm thresholds that are normatively defined by
society (represented by the red dotted lines) constitute crises.
Figure 3: Crisis synchronization
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A real-world analogy demonstrates how a conduit can transmit a vector in a way that synchronizes
systems. When several metronomes are placed on a sliding platform, each set to the same tempo but
started out of rhythm with the others, they will quickly synchronize their oscillations—that is, fall into
the same rhythm. The platform (conduit) transmits the kinetic energy (vector) generated by each
metronome (a system) to the other metronomes. When two metronomes happen to align in rhythm,
their combined force keeps them in time with one another, and the energy they jointly communicate
through the platform increases, encouraging other metronomes to adopt the same rhythm, until all the
metronomes on the platform swing in unison. The process constitutes a positive feedback that, though
invisible to the untrained observer, produces a striking effect—inter-systemic synchronization.
Figure design by Jacob Buurma, Vibrant Content.
Figure 4: Basic model of systemic crisis
In Figure 4A, stresses interact with a trigger in a single system to generate a crisis. The multiplication
sign indicates that stresses and trigger are both causally necessary for the crisis outcome and that the
trigger multiplies the impact of the underlying stresses. Figure 4B represents the above process using a
“stability landscape,” which is a visual metaphor depicting stability and change in complex systems
(Folke et al., 2010; Walker et al., 2004). The horizontal axis represents the range of possible system
states defined by different values of the system’s core state variables; it condenses (figuratively) an n-
dimensional state space into one dimension. The vertical axis represents the degree of system stability;
lower positions denote greater stability (and therefor greater probability) than higher ones. The ball
represents the system’s state—the values of its core state variables—at a particular moment in time.
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The ball tends to roll downwards—towards higher probability states—as if drawn by gravity towards
greater stability into a “basin of attraction.” But the ball never entirely settles at the bottom of its basin;
instead, it is constantly jostled within the basin by the system’s internal processes and by perturbations
from its surrounding environment. Each basin represents a dynamic equilibrium—a set of feedbacks and
relationships that constrain the system’s behaviors and provide long-term stability amidst its short-term
fluctuations; together the basins keep the system state in bounded regions of the full landscape.
A critical transition (also known as a “regime shift”) occurs when a perturbation pushes the system from
an established equilibrium into a different one that encompasses a different set of system states and
behaviors. Once a system is forced out of equilibrium, it may move into a different basin and thereby
complete a critical transition, it may return to its original equilibrium (if antecedent conditions are
restored), or it may move around the landscape without settling. The latter situation constitutes a
systemic crisis—an incomplete critical transition in which the system has left one basin of attraction but
not yet settled into another, and thus remains in a highly unstable and potentially harmful state. Figure
4B illustrates how system stresses can act to make a basin of attraction shallower, so that a trigger event
can more easily push the system out of equilibrium.
Figure 5: Crisis interactions within a single system
Figure 5A: In some cases, a trigger event is the final increment of a slowly-building stress that pushes the
system past a critical threshold and out of its equilibrium, like the proverbial straw that broke the
camel’s back. In such cases, the stress and the trigger event both relate to the same accumulating
pressure. Climate heating, for example, is a long-term stress, but the final increment of heating that
“flips” a climate tipping element to a new regime constitutes the trigger event that pushes the climate
system into crisis.
Figure 5B: A crisis may feed back upon the stresses and/or trigger event that produced it. A financial
crisis, for example, could worsen the stress of massive public and private debt that, in part, enabled the
crisis to emerge. A financial crisis could also intensify (or repeat) its own trigger event, by spurring
further inflation or interest rate hikes, for instance.
[Suggestion: use the same table format/layout we use for this Figure in the document: “Responses to
Reviewer Comments”]
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Figure 6A: Common stresses
The same stress (indicated by the green boxes) may affect two or more systems. An aging population,
for example, places additional demands on healthcare systems. It also strains the economy by
diminishing the workforce while increasing government spending on healthcare and social welfare.
Figure 6B: Common triggers
The same trigger (indicated by the green boxes) may interact with stresses in several systems to produce
multiple crises. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions imposed in response, for example,
triggered a crisis in the energy system and in the food system.
Figure 6C: Interacting stresses
A stress in one system may causally interact with a stress in a second system, which could then affect
the stress in the first system (as indicated by the blue arrow denoting a causal relationship). Food
insecurity, for example, forces the poor to devote a major portion of their income to their alimentary
needs rather than education, investment, and enterprise. The result is greater poverty and inequality in
the economic system, which may then lower incomes and worsen food insecurity for the most
vulnerable segments of society.
Figure 6D: Inter-systemic stress-trigger interactions
A stress in one system may generate a trigger event in another system. By disrupting habitats, for
example, climate heating in the Earth system increases the zone of contact between humans and
unfamiliar animal species, which increases the likelihood of a zoonotic (animal to human) viral transfer
that triggers a pandemic.
Figure 6E: Crisis impacts on adjacent systems
A crisis in one system may causally affect the stresses and/or trigger event of another system. The
Covid-19 pandemic, for example, deepened the stress of socio-economic inequality, while aggressive
fiscal responses by governments triggered inflation.
Figure 6F: Inter-systemic crisis interactions
A crisis in one system may causally interact with a crisis in another system, altering the dynamics of
each. An international security crisis, for example, can worsen the climate crisis by diverting urgently
needed attention and resources from climate action, while the climate crisis can intensify an
international security crisis by escalating conflict over resources and propelling mass migration.
[Suggestion: use the same table format/layout we use for this Figure in the document: “Responses to
Reviewer Comments”]
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Figure 7: An example of interactions between multiple systems
A pandemic crisis arising from the human-viral ecological system triggers a crisis in the healthcare
system, which then further amplifies the pandemic crisis. This example uses elements of the ideal types
shown in Figures 6E and 6F.
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Figure 8: Domino effects in the global polycrisis
Figure design by Jacob Buurma, Vibrant Content. [figure is explained in the body of the text]
Figure 9: Inter-systemic feedback loops in the global polycrisis
Figure design by Jacob Buurma, Vibrant Content. [figure is explained in the body of the text]
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1 Published online by Cambridge University Press
