ABOUT THE POLYCRISIS PROGRAM

Entangled Crises

Humanity faces an array of grave, long-term challenges, now often labeled “global systemic risks.” They include climate change, biodiversity loss, novel zoonotic diseases, widening economic inequalities, financial system instability, large-scale forced migrations, pernicious social impacts of digitalization, ideological extremism, political and social unrest, and an escalating danger of nuclear war. All of these risks are deeply intertwined with long-running demographic trends and surging population growth.

In short, global systemic risks have become causally entangled and, as a result, are producing harms far greater than the sum of harms they would produce in isolation. We call this outcome a “global polycrisis.”

Our leaders have responded with urgency, ingenuity, and resourcefulness. But they’ve also often declared, in the aftermath, that no one could have anticipated or planned for these events, because they were unprecedented. While crises like climate change and the pandemic may have been unprecedented in severity, that does not mean they were completely unanticipated. The underlying trends and risks have been clear to specialists for years. And these same indicators now point to a future of near-constant, and steadily worsening, environmental, economic, and social disruption.

Polycrisis Analysis

We need a fundamentally new approach to policymaking in a world that is changing incredibly fast in ways no one fully understands. We need to better anticipate and respond to cascading failures by better assessing and reducing risks across multiple intersecting systems. Specifically, we need to improve how we marshal, integrate, apply, and communicate the best knowledge about emerging risks—those known and anticipated, as well as those unexpected and even currently unimaginable.

The Polycrisis program team continually scans the horizon for emerging systemic risks and their potential interconnected effects, especially those not seen by oft-siloed government and university academic departments. It draws on and integrates scientific expertise across multiple scientific disciplines and knowledge systems from around the world and actively consults with business leaders, Indigenous communities, frontline actors, and other experts.

Building a Community of Polycrisis Research and Action

There is now a small but growing community centred on polycrisis research and action.

Nurturing and expanding this community requires a stronger group identity, wider inclusion of diverse perspectives, increased public outreach, and expanded organizational infrastructure, such as research positions, communications platforms, annual meetings, and cooperative coordination. The Cascade Institute provides a coordinating role within this community as it purses a set of shared principles, initiatives to increase participation from the Global South and other underrepresented groups, means to support members intellectually and financially, and strategies to increase communication and understanding both within the group and beyond.

To encourage the development of the Polycrisis field, the Cascade Institute has created polycrisis.org; a resource hub that helps this emerging community better understand and address the intersecting crises affecting humanity.