Time to confront the polycrisis and stop playing whack-a-mole
Global problems connected, Philip Steenkamp writes.
On July 12, 2016, a Twitter user named Katie Loewy tweeted: “I'm not saying that David Bowie was holding the fabric of the universe together, but *gestures broadly at everything*.”
The tweet, coming six months after the iconic singer-songwriter's death, garnered a modest (by viral standards) 12,000 likes. But the phrase “gestures broadly at everything” and its variants live on — a shorthand for the exhausting procession of crisis after momentous crisis that has dominated headlines, politics and public discourse now for years.
That catastrophic parade feels like it's picking up steam. Take 2016's concerns over global warming and Donald Trump's candidacy, and add today's COVID-19, increasingly dire climate disasters, global inflation, encroaching authoritarianism, a health-care infrastructure groaning under spiralling demand, and political polarization and mistrust — along with your choices from the rest of a Devil's smorgasbord of threats and dangers — and you can quickly go from gesturing broadly to flailing wildly.
And flailing may feel like the only option; who can hope to understand why we're facing such a wide, menacing array of crises all at once? Losing Bowie might seem like as good an explanation as any for what looks like a cold streak of historic, and potentially history-ending proportions.
A closer analysis, though, tells us this isn't luck. It's a very particular dynamic in action — one known as polycrisis.
In a polycrisis, multiple crises are connected, with each of them fuelling the others in positive feedback loops. The term is often credited to Jean-Claude Juncker, who was president of the European Commission around the same time as Loewy was composing her tweet. He used it to refer to the challenges Europe was facing of security threats, a refugee crisis and the Brexit referendum.
Complexity researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon, founder and director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University, talks of our current situation in similar terms — except now the scope is global, and the threats are existential.
In a New York Times op-ed last month, he and Prof. Johan Rockström of the University of Potsdam framed the polycrisis as “a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises ... causing worldwide damage much greater than the sum of their individual harms.”
It's not hard to find examples of one crisis amplifying another. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to energy shortages, sending gasoline prices skyward and fuelling both inflation and economic instability.
Climate-change-driven floods and droughts drive human displacement, leading to conflict, poverty and social unrest.
These are problems much larger than any one organization or country can hope to solve. Our only hope for survival lies in multilateral structures and solutions that fluidly cross disciplines and jurisdictions.
Fortunately, there's a growing number of leaders and practitioners steeped in interdisciplinary work. In Canada, many of them have gained this experience through innovative approaches at our post-secondary institutions. At Royal Roads University, for instance, our programs intentionally bring students together from across disciplines to collaborate as they learn; faculty members routinely work across disciplines in their research and teaching.
As institutions, communities, governments and a species, I have hope that we can rise to this multi-faceted challenge. One big step would be the kind of global scientific collaboration that Homer-Dixon and Rockström propose in their article.
What's especially exciting about that proposal is the opportunity to turn the tables on the polycrisis: using those same feedback loops to fight vicious circles with virtuous ones — cascades of successes, as building resilience in one area of our communities and economies triggers advances in others.
First, though, we need the political will to make such a massive collaboration possible. We can generate the will by starting with smaller, more focused projects that show the approach's effectiveness; that said, the very nature of the polycrisis suggests we'll want to scale up quickly.
Seeing and addressing the multiple crises we're facing has left us playing whack-a-mole. Seeing them as a polycrisis, with each reinforcing the others, can help us do more than gesture broadly at everything — and actually trigger those cascades of successes.