Has the “Polycrisis” overwhelmed us?

Has the “Polycrisis” overwhelmed us?

by Mark Leonard in Project Syndicate…Today’s global crises are not only competing for policymakers’ finite attention; they are increasingly feeding one another in unpredictable ways. Add the uncertainty around this year’s high-stakes elections in the United States and elsewhere, and you have a recipe for a Davos meeting defined by angst and paralysis.

The 100-Year extinction panic is back, right on schedule

by Tyler Austin Harper in The New York Times…Climate anxiety, of the sort expressed by that student, is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic while we are told to expect worse contagions to come. The near coup at OpenAI, which resulted at least in part from a dispute about whether artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction, is only the latest example of our ballooning angst about technology overtaking us.

Friction is growing

by Bill McKibben in Resilience.org…The past decade of global natural catastrophes has been the costliest ever. Warmer temperatures have made storms worse and contributed to droughts that have elevated wildfire risk. Too many new homes were built in areas at risk of fire.

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The Eco-Civilization Framework

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by Curtis Ogden in the International Institute for Social Change….“The more flexible the sub-systems, the longer the expected life of the system as a...
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Chartbook 268: “How can we not know?”: CAR and the challenge of tracking a silent crisis.

By Adam Tooze in Chartbook 268…It was at a moment when many of us were discussing the polycrisis as a concept with which to grasp the current world. Was an...
Mar 18 2024

History’s crisis detectives: How we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse – and clues about the future

by Daniel Hoyer in The Conversation….Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people...