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)
Characteristics
Christopher Hobson and Matthew Davies:
"A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:
(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.
(2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.
(3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.
(4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.
(5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).
(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.
(7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.
(8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge."
(https://imperfectnotes.substack.com/p/polycrisis)
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 |