What is a polycrisis, and why does the word matter?

Crises have always overlapped. What is new is how tightly they are now coupled. A drought that cuts a harvest, a war that closes a shipping lane and a spike in interest rates that squeezes indebted importers used to be separate stories. Increasingly they are one story, told in several chapters at once.

That is the intuition behind the word polycrisis. It describes a situation in which several crises are not merely simultaneous but entangled, each amplifying the others.

Where the word comes from

The French thinkers Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern used the term in the 1990s to describe the interwoven problems of a globalising planet. It stayed in academic circles for two decades. Then the pandemic, supply-chain disruption, energy-price shocks and war arrived in quick succession, and the historian Adam Tooze, among others, revived it to describe a world in which no single crisis could be understood alone.

Three ways crises become entangled

Researchers at the Cascade Institute distinguish between several mechanisms. Simplified, they come down to three:

1. Common causes. One underlying stress, such as rising temperatures, feeds several crises at once: crop failure, migration, water scarcity.
2. Domino effects. A shock in one system spills into another, as when an energy-price spike becomes a food-price spike via fertiliser costs.
3. Shared fragility. Separate shocks hit the same weak points, such as over-stretched public finances or thin inventories, exhausting the capacity to respond.

Food systems64%

Public finances52%

Power grids41%

Health systems37%

Shipping & logistics29%

Source: Illustrative data for demonstration only

Why the label is useful

Critics say polycrisis is a fashionable word for “lots of bad things happening”. That is fair when the term is used loosely. Used carefully, it does real work. It shifts attention from individual risks to the connections between them, which is where much of the damage is done and where the cheapest interventions often lie.

The question is not only “what could go wrong?” but “what goes wrong next, because of that?”

For a finance ministry, that might mean stress-testing the budget against a food-price shock and a currency shock at the same time. For a city, it might mean checking whether the cooling centres meant to protect people in a heatwave depend on the same grid that fails in one.

What it implies

The practical lesson is modest but important. Resilience planning that treats risks one by one will systematically underestimate the danger. Mapping the links, and investing in the buffers that protect several systems at once, is usually a better use of scarce money than hardening any single system in isolation.