Why polycrisis matters to you
We are living through a time of intersecting crises that compound each other's effects. This changes the meaning of decisions large and small in ways institutions may not be prepared for.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock event, creating conditions of extraordinary emergency and disruption around the world. Many of us remember the year 2020 as a time of uncertainty, peril, fear, loss, and in good cases, cooperation. Many of the effects are ongoing, and COVID still poses a serious public health threat. The pandemic also gave rise to a new term—polycrisis—described by the Cascade Institute as follows:
“A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”
The polycrisis is our new reality of multiple overlapping and interacting threats, which disrupt everyday life and shatter previously stable background conditions. A core challenge in this situation is finding language that is both specific enough to talk about what is happening and general enough to have relevance across the countless diverse conditions people are facing.
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, putting international peace and security and rule of law at risk, and destabilizing global food supplies, it became common to cite “climate, COVID, and conflict” as three drivers of crisis.
The disruption of grain exports from Ukraine and fertilizer exports from Russia spread food insecurity and acute hunger around the world, nudging dozens of countries to the brink of famine.
All of this was worse, because most countries had not been able to fully rebuild supply chains broken by the COVID emergency.
Another critical background condition was that climate disruption was already making it harder to reliably produce enough food, affordably, for everyone, while imposing rising costs on public agencies, communities, and business, straining the everyday economy.
But those three factors, and their respective first-order effects, are not the entire polycrisis. First of all, there is wider planetary crisis across multiple dimensions. The planetary crisis encompasses climate disruption, and its direct and intersecting effects, but also pollution, including toxic chemicals and plastic pollution, acidification of watersheds and marine ecosystems due to carbon pollution, and also nature breakdown, the collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity, and the worsening breach of planetary boundaries.
Planetary boundaries are the upper limit for what Earth can sustain, in terms of human industrial-scale disruption of planetary systems and natural resource reserves. Breaching a planetary boundary means entering into a state where human life as we know it is no longer sustainable, in operational terms. Eventually, what we hope to have and experience, including nourishment and safety, will not be possible.
In 2023, the formal scientific assessment of 9 planetary boundaries found we are actively breaching six of them. Data show a clear progression toward more stress on planetary systems over time, with the effect being that the biosphere, Earth’s habitable space, is experiencing increasingly poor health. We know this will bring major costs—at both the macro and micro scales. What we don’t know is when we will cross “tipping points”, after which some of the ingredients of a livable world become unrecoverable.
The 2023 State of the Climate report included this stark warning:
“By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023).”
As we have noted before and will again, financial regulators find climate disruption alone will cause the collapse of the financial system and with it the wider everyday economy. According to analysis conducted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (in 2020, under Trump) and the Financial Stability Oversight Council (in 2021, under Biden), unchecked climate change could lead to conditions in which the US is a failed economy.
Climate disruption is not only a crisis for nature and ecosystems. It is already disrupting food supplies, public budgets, infrastructure resilience, access to insurance, household budgets, local economies, human health, and the security and stability of nations. Related costs are already embedded in nearly everything you buy, though ways of measuring those costs and making them visible are still being developed.
As these tools develop, and it becomes easier for people, businesses, and governments, to understand where specific investments not only increase costs but exacerbate one or more elements of the polycrisis, economic imperatives will shift.
Investors will look for safe haven and new opportunities.
Insurers will demand more responsible practices.
Governments will shift subsidies to reduce risk and build value.
Trade relations will evolve to support business models that capture or enhance increased resilience value.
Your everyday experiences are being shaped by the polycrisis now. The amount, quality, and depth of reporting on all related areas of concern will help to determine whether decisions made in your name make your life safer, freer, and more prosperous, or whether you are asked to carry the weight for more powerful actors.