Polycrisis

The cascading and connected crises we find ourselves in at the beginning of 2023 demand a new descriptor to define the scale of the problems the world is facing.

The war in Ukraine sent energy and food prices soaring. The resulting inflationary pressures ignited a global cost-of-living crisis which has led to social unrest. On top of all that, carbon emissions continued to rise as economies reopened after the pandemic.

The collective vocabularies stored in the world’s great dictionaries didn’t appear to hold a single world to sum up all this strife. So here’s a new one: Polycrisis.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 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 world is facing connected risks that threaten a polycrisis.
• The cost-of-living crisis is the most immediate and severe global risk.
• Climate-related risks are the biggest future threat facing the world.
• A polycrisis could have catastrophic consequences including armed conflict.

We’re on the brink of a ‘polycrisis’ – how worried should we be? by Simon Torkington, World Economic Forum, Jan 13, 2023