By Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström
Alanah Sarginson
It seems as if the world is encountering a “perfect storm” of simultaneous crises: The coronavirus pandemic is approaching the end of its third year; the war in Ukraine is threatening to go nuclear; extreme climate events are afflicting North America, Europe, Asia and Africa; and inflation is reaching rates unseen in decades and authoritarianism is on the march around the world. But the storm metaphor implies that this simultaneity is an unfortunate and temporary coincidence — that it’s humanity’s bad luck that everything seems to be going haywire all at once.
In reality, the likelihood that the current mess is a coincidence is vanishingly small. We’re almost certainly confronting something far more persistent and dangerous. We can see the crises of the moment, but we’re substantially blind to the hidden processes by which those crises worsen one another — and to the true dangers that may be enveloping us all.
Today’s mess is better understood as a global polycrisis, a term the historian Adam Tooze at Columbia has recently popularized. The term implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises. Precisely because these crises are so entangled, they’re causing worldwide damage much greater than the sum of their individual harms.
In the last 10 years, things have gone fundamentally awry. Rates of global hunger, numbers of migrants forced to move within countries and across borders, levels of political authoritarianism, violations of human rights and the occurrence of violent demonstrations and ongoing conflict — these measures of harm are all up, and in some cases by a lot. At the same time, the average human life expectancy dropped to 70.96 years in 2021, from an estimated 72.6 years in 2019, the first decline since the United Nations began tabulating such data in 1950.
Taken in isolation, natural and social stresses that can lead to a global crisis are often identified as “systemic risks.” They include climate heating, zoonotic disease outbreaks (disease transmitted from animals to humans), biodiversity decline, worsening economic inequality, financial system instability, ideological extremism, cyberattacks, mounting social and political unrest and geopolitical imbalances.
