The term "polycrisis", which first appeared in the late 1990s, became a reflection of the spirit of the present time. He was chosen as the main neologism at the last meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in early 2023. This term reflects a complex of global problems: a pandemic, military conflicts, extreme climatic phenomena, energy shortages, inflation and growing authoritarianism.
Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon in an article for Vox revealed the interrelationships of current economic and social problems.
Finam.ru tells why the current situation in the world can be considered a polycrisis, and how to deal with it.
What is polycrisis?
In fact, a polycrisis is a set of interrelated crises. Critics of such a concept believe that this is just another fashionable term that describes something that has already been repeatedly encountered in the course of history. Homer-Dixon, on the contrary, believes that what is happening today is unique and is just included in the concept of polycrisis.
Adam Tooze, a Columbia University historian who is considered one of the most thoughtful proponents of this concept, believes that today the world is a stunning synthesis of long-established trends and new phenomena.
Homer-Dixon compares four key, in his opinion, indicators in human history in order to see what is new, which is the essence of the current polycrisis.
1. Total energy consumption. Thus, thanks to the growing use of cheap fossil fuels, humanity has increased energy consumption by 6 times since 1950. Since that date, people have consumed about 60% of all the energy they have produced during their existence. According to Homer-Dixon, no other factor has changed the economy of human civilization so much.
2. Changing the energy balance of the Earth. Since the evolution of modern man until the 20th century, the amount of energy coming to Earth from space (mainly the visible light of the Sun) has been roughly balanced by the amount of energy returning (mainly in the form of heat). But now less energy goes out than it comes in, because greenhouse gas emissions keep more heat in the atmosphere. The imbalance is at least 0.9 watts per square meter on the surface of the planet.
At first glance, it's not much, but the extra energy accumulates quickly. If we sum up the entire surface of the Earth, then this amount of energy will be released when 600 thousand atomic bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima. This additional energy, entering the atmosphere and oceans, not only increases their temperature, but also accelerates the hydrological system of the planet, the water cycle between the Earth's surface and the air, which leads to increased storms, floods, droughts, forest fires and other natural disasters.
According to Homer-Dixon, changing the physical properties of the planet has an indirect impact on global food production, mass migration, economic growth and civil stability, which are already sucking trillions of dollars of wealth out of the global economy. This alone is enough to state that the situation of humanity is fundamentally different now.
3. Population growth. In the 125 years from 1800 to 1925, the world's population roughly doubled - from 1 billion to 2 billion people. For almost 100 years since then, it has grown four times more, to 8 billion. Significantly higher energy costs for agriculture - for mechanization, irrigation, fertilizer production, etc. - made this faster growth possible. In other words, without fossil fuels, our population would be smaller than it is today.
4. Logistics and other connections. Airplanes, container ships, fiber optic cables, satellites, oil tankers and pipelines - all this connects people to each other these days. This has become possible thanks to the use of fossil fuels and an increase in the computing power of devices that people now carry in their pockets. And we are now connected to as many sources of information as any of the previous generations.
Discrete changes are one big polycrisis
The worst of these factors is the change in the energy balance of the Earth. However, all four factors are markers of an unprecedented transformation of human living conditions - explosive growth in population, consumption, connections and global environmental impact, starting around 1950, which some scientists call the "great acceleration".
Both the acceleration of general changes and the causal interactions between them are important. According to Homer-Dixon, it is they who give rise to today's polycrisis. Thus, scientists have shown that ecological, technological or social systems that are both closely connected and highly homogeneous are particularly prone to cascading failures, that is, failures resembling a falling row of dominoes. A high degree of connectivity allows a failure - for example, a pathogen or an external shock - to move quickly from one part of the system to others. High uniformity ensures that the destruction will be noticeable in all parts.
According to the political scientist, the combination of the homogeneity of humanity with its growing number, and now with extraordinary connectivity, has created a qualitatively new situation. If in the XIX century cholera spread across the planet for years, and in 1918 the flu spread for months, now the causative agents of infectious diseases get to the other side of the world in a few weeks. Our species has become, by far, the most attractive environment on Earth for the rapid evolution and spread of pathogens.
The financial, technological and production systems of mankind are also becoming more coherent and homogeneous. The markets are dominated by large corporations that set their standards in different spheres of life. For example, all over the planet, people choose from several social media platforms and from a couple of operating systems for PCs and mobile devices.
According to Homer-Dixon, this decrease in diversity, combined with hyper-connectivity, leads to cascading failures when key systems are subjected to a sudden shock.
Thus, the pandemic has complicated the supply chains of standardized goods that affected the whole world and catalyzed global inflation.
Ransomware attacks using standardized software now regularly cause huge damage to vital services, including healthcare and energy.
In the near future, extreme weather conditions may harm the crops of several exporting countries at the same time, which will lead to disruption of world trade in grain, which provides a significant part of humanity's nutrition.
How to defuse a polycrisis?
Homer-Dixon offers his vision of how humanity can get out of polycrisis. He notes that the deteriorating energy imbalance on Earth seems to be becoming the single most powerful driving force of crises in many environmental, economic and social systems, so humanity needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero as soon as possible.
As for other factors of polycrisis, we can mitigate the impact of connectivity and homogeneity in many systems, and specific steps will depend on where exactly we will fight the crisis. For example, if we want to make pandemics less widespread and severe, we will have to regularly restrict people's travel during virus outbreaks. Despite liberal claims about the human rights implications of these restrictions, they do help slow the spread of diseases by allowing societies to prepare and helping them smooth the infection curve.
To reduce the frequency and harm from cascading failures in food, technological and economic systems, we must reduce their uniformity. For example, through tax incentives and regulation that will encourage companies to diversify the world's food stocks, software ecosystems and financial instruments.
First of all, we need to better understand the mechanisms underlying polycrisis. Why are so many important world systems simultaneously moving into negative territory? At the moment we have only fragments of the answer mainly because universities, corporations, think tanks and governments divide their experience and attention into categories corresponding to different systems - economics, healthcare, climate, geopolitics and the like. Thus, they do not see the relationship between these systems and act less effectively as a result.
According to Homer-Dixon, the problem starts from the top: the elites of our societies and the institutions they lead and create simply cannot understand what is happening. To begin with, they need to stop believing that nothing new is happening in the world.
