The polycrisis is something I’ve mentioned in a few blogs. Yet the term is still fairly uncommon, so in this post I’ll shed some light on what the polycrisis is, and how we can navigate a way through it.
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What is the polycrisis?
The term ‘polycrisis’ encapsulates the collective crises that humanity faces. These crises are intertwined and their impacts are often compounded by one and other.
In other words, whilst one crisis will have its own impacts, they will play out at the same time as all the other crises and their respective impacts. Imagine the impacts of one crisis are symbolised by a large ocean wave travelling at great speed towards the shore. Now imagine multiple crises represented by multiple large ocean waves which then merge with each other into a towering tsunami that could decimate everything in its path. That’s the polycrisis in a nutshell.
In 2023, the World Economic Forum discussed how the interconnectedness of various risks threatened a polycrisis. Some of these risks included:
- Failure to mitigate climate change
- Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse
- Natural resource depletion
- Interstate conflict
- Large-scale involuntary immigration
- Cost-of-living crises
- Debt crises
- Employment crises
- Infectious diseases
- Erosion of social cohesion
- Misinformation and disinformation
- Cybercrime
- Adverse outcomes of frontier technologies (e.g. AI)
- Use of weapons of mass destruction
A crisis may appear to be isolated, but it will often have repercussions that cause further crises or exacerbate existing ones. For example, climate change is often called a threat multiplier. Some of its impacts include more extreme weather, droughts, fires, and floods, as well as rising sea levels. Not only can this lead to biodiversity loss and potential ecosystem collapse, but it also hits food growing regions and water resources (thus leading to the potential for food and water scarcity, which could in turn lead to conflict and potential terrorism). It also threatens to create more climate refugees – many of whom might try immigrate. This in turn stokes anti-immigration sentiment which is on the rise and leading to the election of right-wing politicians, which in turn erodes social cohesion.
The climate emergency is taking place whilst the AI crisis accelerates, which threatens up to one billion jobs, according to Professor Stuart Russell in his book Human Compatible. As people lose their jobs, the economy faces a downturn as there’s less spending, threatening more industries, companies and workers. An unemployment crisis could then be compounded by a cost-of-living and a debt crisis. This could see defaults on mortgage payments, rent arrears, increased homelessness and dependence on state welfare support.
If this comes to pass, certain politicians may ignore the root cause here (AI) and instead appease their base supporters by blaming immigrants (who may have been forced to flee their homelands as climate refugees), to help ensure their election or re-election. If they assume power, many of these right leaning parties push a pro-fossil-fuel agenda which exacerbates the climate crisis, and a pro-AI agenda (which will also accelerate climate breakdown because data centres are currently powered by fossil fuels).
These climate and AI impacts barely scratch the surface of the plethora of risks they herald. But this provides one tiny snapshot of the interrelated nature of some risks within the polycrisis. It’s why both climate and AI experts warn that civilisation may be brought to an end – because our elected leaders are failing to reign in the corporations and individuals who are pushing the world to the brink.
As Luke Kemp writes in his outstanding book, Goliath’s Curse, “We live in a uniquely dangerous time. Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads… the darker angels of our nature are flying us towards evolutionary suicide.”
This “clusterfuck” of interlinked crises are grouped together and labelled as the polycrisis.
What are the core characteristics of the polycrisis?
The polycrisis is comprised of several key characteristics, including:
- Comprised of numerous complex risks
- The crises are happening simultaneously
- Each crisis has the potential to create additional crises or worsen existing ones
- As the crises interlap, so do the impacts, so that disentangling the direct cause of each impact becomes increasingly difficult
- Global in scale
- Affects interconnected systems
- Threatens the future of civilisation as we know it
Are we in an era of polycrisis?
Yes. Each of the characteristics outlined above has been met for this to be termed an era of polycrisis. We’re living through a time of unparalleled risks, any one of which could cause profound impacts, with some like the climate and AI crises being capable of causing civilisational collapse.
Is the polycrisis global?
Yes. Issues such as the climate emergency, the AI crisis, biodiversity loss, immigration, infectious diseases and viruses, as well as cybercrime, are global in scope and have global impacts.
What are the long-term effects of a polycrisis?
The long-term impacts are so broad, that it’s nearly impossible to list them all in a blog post. Each individual crisis has its own impacts (e.g. with the climate crisis, there are extreme weather events, sea level rise, higher morbidity rates, increased migration, and more. With the AI crisis, there are deep concerns over job losses, environmental impacts, the loss of what makes us human, making people more reliant on the tech and weakening our social bonds, and so much more).
On top of which, these crises compound and exacerbate interrelated impacts. For example, on our current trajectory, the world could see 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050. These displaced people would need new homes, jobs, and lives. But as previously mentioned, Professor Stuart Russell believes we may lose one billion jobs to AI. So, we could witness the widespread displacement of large swathes of humanity, in a politically polarised (and anti-immigration atmosphere) all whilst up to a billion people become jobless and potentially homeless, losing the anchor of their career and general purpose in their life.
The long-term impacts of this? Well, we can certainly guess what this may lead to, but the truth is that this level of upheaval would be unprecedented. As the polycrisis accelerates, things wouldn’t stabilise but continue to worsen.
This is one of the reasons experts warn we face the real risk of civilisational collapse this century. We’ve reached this point because elected politicians haven’t tackled the spiralling issues we face which have converged into the polycrisis.
Who coined the term ‘polycrisis’?
According to the polycrisis.org website, the term was coined by Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern in their book Homeland Earth in 1999, where they said that the world faces “many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.”
Since then, the term has been used by the likes of the sociologist Mark Swilling, Jean-Claude Juncker (when he was President of the European Commission), the historian Adam Tooze, and the World Economic Forum in 2023.
How does the polycrisis differ from the metacrisis?
The polycrisis is like the overarching amalgamation of crises that we face, whilst the metacrisis is focused on the foundational causes of these problems. For example, whilst the polycrisis includes the climate emergency and the AI crisis, the metacrisis includes things like “deep human tendencies” and human nature as the root causes of these problems.
Rufus Pollock and Rosie Bell wrote in an article that, “polycrisis names an entanglement of interconnected crises that affect one another. Metacrisis, by contrast, identifies foundational conditions that generate these crises.”
Will the polycrisis be the downfall of civilisation?
On our current trajectory and without radical change, it’s entirely possible that civilisation will not make it through this century.
The Doomsday clock now stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to disaster. According to a press release, it reached this position due to factors including, “growing nuclear weapons threats, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), multiple biological security concerns, and the continuing climate crisis.”
The world’s leading climate and AI experts including Dr James Hansen (the “Godfather of Global Warming”), and Nobel prize-winner Geoffrey Hinton (one of three “Godfathers of AI”), are warning that unless urgent action is taken, the climate emergency and the AI crisis will upend society.
In a paper published last year, a team led by Dr James Hansen warned of an AMOC shutdown by 2050, triggering a cascade of climate tipping points and ultimately symbolising a “point of no return.”
Geoffrey Hinton has said there’s up to a 20% chance of AI causing human extinction within the next 30 years. Whilst in their book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares write that Geoffrey Hinton believes the risk is actually above 50%, but chooses not to say this publicly, “because there’s other people who think it’s less.”
While Luke Kemp writes in Goliath’s Curse, “It is hard to see how we can escape without a global collapse unfolding.” He lists predictions from a range of experts and says that, “Averaging these experts’ opinions gives us a one in three chance of facing a global collapse, or something far worse, by the end of the century.”
If you’re struggling to plan for the future in light of this, I wrote a blog here that may be of interest.
Is the polycrisis causing poor mental health?
Yes. Theresa MacPhail wrote a brilliant article entirely on this subject in the Guardian.
Climate and ecological breakdown has increased both climate anxiety and eco-anxiety, with some individuals going so far as choosing not to have children given their concerns for the future.
Meanwhile the unregulated and rapid uptake of AI which threatens our very future as well as our livelihoods, could potentially lead to an unparalleled global mental health crisis fuelled by AI-anxiety and tech anxiety.
How do we solve the polycrisis?
One common denominator in all the crises that make up the polycrisis is politicians. Many crises (such as climate breakdown and the AI crisis) were caused by or exacerbated by politicians, through their support of the corporations behind these problems and their unwillingness to regulate them. The remainder of the crises in the polycrisis have been purposely unaddressed or ignored by politicians which has created the beast of the polycrisis we face. This was acknowledged in the press release by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who set the Doomsday Clock, where they say:
“Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe…”
Now that we know what the root cause is, we can begin looking for solutions. Most countries have a representative democracy, whereby we elect politicians to represent us in Parliament. However, there is an alternative form of democracy that was successfully practiced in Ancient Athens until an invasion brought it down 200 years later. It’s called participatory democracy.
Participatory democracy is where citizens represent themselves in a range of processes, such as citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, and participatory budgeting processes. In Ancient Athens a small number of citizens’ assemblies were responsible for decision-making, and these functioned so well that Aristotle once said that democracy is based on sortition (randomly choosing citizens to participate in these types of processes), but that elections were linked to oligarchy.
Modern day assemblies in the 21st century have been severely hampered by one factor – politicians. The reason being that modern day assemblies are often ad-hoc (one-off) events, and crucially, they typically haven’t been legally binding. So even though they’ve produced some excellent recommendations on a range of divisive and complex topics, politicians have chosen to ignore them – and been allowed to get away with it.
If we’re genuinely committed to maintaining a liveable future, I believe politicians have made it abundantly clear that they won’t solve these issues. Take just the single issue of the climate crisis. Politicians have failed to tackle this enormous threat with mountains of scientific evidence behind it, despite having 30 annual global climate summits, backed by around 40 years of scientific warnings. If they were really going to turn the tide, they would’ve done so already.
Now, multiply this failure across all the individual crises that make up the polycrisis and you realise that we’re in deep trouble with little chance of politicians tackling many, if any, of these problems. Politicians have made it clear that no meaningful change will be coming from them, so we need to rapidly transition away from this broken democratic model to one that actually works.
We will need to push for a switch from representative democracy to participatory democracy and a system that could bring us back from the brink of chaos. Maybe, just maybe, we might then stand a chance of unravelling the polycrisis and building a collective future that humanity can be proud of.
Polycrisis book recommendations
Polycrisis.org has a long list of book recommendations. A very brief selection I’d recommend include:
- A Farewell to Ice by Peter Wadhams
- Falter by Bill McKibben
- Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp
- Hothouse Earth by Bill McGuire
- Human Compatible by Stuart Russell
- If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
- Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
- Our Final Warning by Mark Lynas
- Supremacy by Parmy Olson
- The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg
- The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
I’ve been writing about the climate emergency since 2016, and the AI crisis since 2023. I write all my own work, without the use of AI. I don’t publish on any other paid platforms, and my blog remains completely free to read. If you’ve found my writing informative and if you’d like to support my work, I’d be really grateful if you did so here. Thank you.
My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon, including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.