Currently reading Lawrence et al. (2024) on the “Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement”

Let’s read about everybody’s favourite topic: The polycrisis! Here, I am summarizing a framework that takes “polycrisis” from buzzword to useful concept.

Lawrence et al. (2024) start by pointing out that the “perfect storm” metaphor (that is often used to describe the mess we are currently in as a coincidental “bad luck” of lots of crises happening at the same time) is actually misleading, since all these crises are actually connected, trigger and worsen each other; producing effects that are much larger than the sum of all the individual crises. The buzzword “polycrisis” has been criticized as hiding that capitalism is really the root cause of a lot of problems, or as putting old wine in new bottles, or on focusing on population growth when in reality it is a lot more complex.

Lawrence et al. (2022) therefore define a “global polycrisis” as “the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects“. In that definition,

• “crisis” is a sudden non-linear event that can quickly harm a lot of people and therefore requires urgent action. It is important to have criteria for what counts as a crisis (e.g. an event killing a certain percentage of humanity), so the term cannot as easily be politicized .
• “poly-” means many, but in case of the polycrisis, it also indicates that those many crises are causally inter-related, so that a disturbance in one place will activate a domino effect that then impacts the entire system or even spill out of the system and disrupt others, causing harm in all places.

This means that a polycrisis needs to be understood and addressed as a whole (meaning world-wide and in all systems) and cannot be “fixed” just for or by one system, region, facet. It is thus an “emergent” phenomenon.

Crises can be brought from one part of a system to another through four main vectors (which can also all apply at the same time or after each other):

• Energy (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes)
• Matter (e.g. toxins)
• Information (e.g. code, news, ideologies, money (!!), laws, …)
• Biota (e.g. viruses, bacteria, invasive species)

They give this example: “A hurricane […] 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.” This elicits so many other examples in my head, for example the Chernobyl nuclear accident when I was a kid that brought radioactive rain to our garden, which meant that we couldn’t play in the grass and sandbox… But also the speed at which information — and especially misinformation — can be created and spread these days, and cause inappropriate responses… Thinking about these vectors actually makes it much more intriguing to me!

Next, Lawrence et al. (2024) argue that we are in a global polycrisis, and that it is getting worse. The crises involved are, for example, the effects of the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, ideological extremism, political polarization, weather events caused by global warming, and many more. While there have been other polycrises before, this one is worse since the world is much more interconnected now than back then — in communication, trade, standardization. For example, if there is only one type of crop being grown without any genetic variability, it just needs one wrong bug or disease to wipe out the whole thing globally. But not only that, crises seem to also synchronize, i.e. appear all at the same time. It is not clear what is happening in detail, but on an abstract level, there are slow-moving stresses and fast-moving trigger events that interact with each other and the resulting crises. In the article, there are a bunch of analogies (like metronoms synchronizing, and balls in basins) to illustrate the ideas, and diagrams of what can act on what else. In a nutshell: It’s complicated! And even more so when we think about multiple systems and the whole globe, domino effects, feedback loops, etc..

For me, the really interesting point of this paper is thinking about the vectors that can bring crises from one place to another, I don’t know why I have never seen that before. Somehow that helped me organize a lot of things in my head, and trigger a lot of new thoughts that I still need to process!

Lawrence, M., Homer-Dixon, T., Janzwood, S., Rockström, J., Renn, O., Donges, J. F. (2024). “Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement”. Global Sustainability 7, e6, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1

Featured image and pics below: Yesterday’s after work dip!

Glorious weather!

And, of course, glorious water!

Love living by the sea!

Don’t know why this is a different aspect ratio, but probably to be able to adequately admire the view…