Are we headed toward a polycrisis?

What is a polycrisis?

The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risks Report uses the term, to explain how “present and future risks can also interact with each other to form a ‘polycrisis’ – a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”. The report cites the below short-term and long-term risks for which there is no quick solution:

We’re on the brink of a ‘polycrisis’ – how worried should we be?
From: World Economic Forum

Polycrisis: a too pessimistic scenario

Not true, argues Noah Smith, there are solutions to the above crises because there are buffer mechanisms i.e. the global economy and political system are full of mechanisms that push back against shocks.

I look out in the world and I don’t see a polycrisis; I see an emerging polysolution. The looming threats of climate change and authoritarian revanchism, combined with the shocks of Covid and inflation, have stirred both policymakers and businesses to action. And many of those actions will end up addressing multiple crises rather than just one.

Against “polycrisis”
By: Noah Smith

Polycrisis: the wrong way to look at the current situation

Farwa Sial argues that a better way to understand the current state of the world is by looking at the structural weaknesses of key developed economies in the West:

Not a polycrisis, instead recent events including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change catastrophes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rise in energy and food prices are generally postulated as separate crises, which can have an effect on each other but nevertheless have separate origins. This centrifugal analysis of events predicates on the decline of the uni-polar world order, as well as acknowledging the emergent structural weaknesses in the traditional western powers; all of which can be loosely interpreted as occurring in a period during which power is dispersing and perhaps as a consequence of this dispersion, the current drivers of crisis have multiplied, leading to a multitude of crises, in contrast to preceding historical instances.

Whose Polycrisis?
By: Farwa Sial – University of Manchester