Risk & ResilienceGuidePolycrisis resilienceNo. 006
GuidePolycrisis: a field guide
What the word means, where it came from, how crises become entangled and what builds resilience. A reference you can scan in five minutes.
- Year Morin and Kern used the term
- 1999
- Core ways crises become entangled
- 3
- Levers that build resilience
- 5
The idea in one paragraph
A polycrisis is a set of crises that interact, so that the combined harm is greater than the sum of the parts. The crises do not simply happen at the same time. They share causes, spill into one another and hit the same weak points. The practical consequence is that managing each risk on its own will underestimate the danger.
How the idea developed
- 1999
The term appears
Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern use polycrisis in Homeland Earth to describe the interwoven problems of a globalising planet.
- 2020–22
Shocks overlap
A pandemic, supply-chain disruption, an energy-price spike and the war in Ukraine arrive in close succession.
- 2022
The word returns
The historian Adam Tooze helps bring polycrisis into mainstream commentary.
- 2023
Policy adopts it
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report uses the idea to frame interacting global risks.
- 2024
Mechanisms formalised
Researchers publish a paper setting out how crises become entangled.
Three ways crises become entangled
01
Common causes
One underlying stress, such as rising temperatures, feeds several crises at once: crop failure, migration, water scarcity.
02
Domino effects
A shock in one system spills into another, as when an energy-price spike becomes a food-price spike through fertiliser costs.
03
Shared fragility
Separate shocks hit the same weak points, such as stretched public finances or thin stockpiles, and exhaust the capacity to respond.
Five levers that build resilience
A
Substitutes
A second way to meet a need when the usual one fails, such as rooftop solar during a blackout.
B
Decentralisation
Many small units that fail one at a time, instead of one large system that fails all at once.
C
Speed of response
Information and resources that move faster than the shock spreads, such as early-warning alerts.
D
Learning curves
Technologies that get cheaper as more people use them, so each wave of adoption makes the next easier.
E
Household buffers
Savings, insurance and mobile payments that let families absorb a shock without lasting harm.
For the evidence behind these levers, see Technology diffusion as polycrisis resilience.
Common questions
Is a polycrisis just several crises at once?
Is the idea new?
Is it only a fashionable label?
What should a government do differently?
Key terms
- Buffer
- Reserves of money, stock or time that absorb a shock.
- Cascade
- A chain of failures in which one breakdown triggers the next.
- Coupling
- The degree to which parts of a system depend on one another. Tight coupling spreads shocks fast.
- Polycrisis
- Interacting crises whose combined harm exceeds the sum of the parts.
- Redundancy
- Spare or duplicate capacity that keeps a system working when one part fails.
- Technology diffusion
- The spread of a technology from its first users to everyone who could benefit.
Sources
- Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium. Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern (1999)
- Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability (Lawrence and others) (2024)
- Global Risks Report 2023. World Economic Forum (2023)