Polycrisis
Description
Via Adam Tooze [1]:
1.
"in April 2022 the Cascade Institute published an interesting report on the theme by Scott Janzwood and Thomas Homer-Dixon. They defined a polycrisis as follows:
We define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects. A systemic risk is a threat emerging within one natural, technological, or social system with impacts extending beyond that system to endanger the functionality of one or more other systems. A global polycrisis, should it occur, will inherit the four core properties of systemic risks—extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty—while also exhibiting causal synchronization among risks."
2.
"The rather wonderful Antereisis cultural blog articulated the radical psychological condition we find ourselves in.
Translation:
The confining world, the permanent state of alarm, the hysteria, panic and paranoia of those who are actually persecuted: what has been subsumed under polycrisis can only be partially and never fully compensated by linguistic articulation and rationalization. Seeing-past, hearing-past, living-past - the blindness to apocalypse - are not an expression of refusal or political passivity, but mechanical consequences of an asymmetry between universal challenges and individual coping capacities."
(https://antereisis.substack.com/p/all-the-angels-are-here)
Visualisation
(from https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-165-polycrisis-thinking )
| Type of risk | Number of “systems of origin” | Scale of outcomes | Magnitude and reversibility of outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systemic risk | One | Possibly regional, continental or global | Typically sub-catastrophic, probably reversible |
| Global catastrophic risk | One | Global | Irreversible and catastrophic degradation of humanity's prospects |
| Polycrisis | Three or more | Possibly regional, continental or global | Sub-catastrophic, possibly reversible |
| Global polycrisis | Three or more | Global | Irreversible and catastrophic degradation of humanity's prospects |