Polycrisis

The term polycrisis describes the entanglement of several simultaneous, structurally different crises—economic, ecological, geopolitical, public-health, technological—whose feedback loops amplify one another. Unlike a single shock or a sequential chain of events, a polycrisis is defined by causal interaction: a climate shock worsens a food crisis, which deepens a debt crisis, which weakens state capacity to handle a pandemic, and so on.

The word was popularized in the 1990s by French theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern in Homeland Earth (1999), who used it to describe the interlocking problems facing humanity. It re-entered mainstream policy vocabulary around 2022–2023, notably through the writing of economic historian Adam Tooze and through the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2023, which framed the post-COVID, post-Ukraine-invasion environment as a polycrisis of cost-of-living pressures, energy disruption, climate impacts, and geopolitical fragmentation.

Analytically, the concept is associated with the Cascade Institute (Thomas Homer-Dixon and colleagues), which distinguishes a polycrisis from a "perfect storm" by emphasizing that the constituent crises originate in different systems but become causally synchronized. Critics argue the term is too elastic to operationalize and risks becoming a buzzword that obscures specific policy choices.

For delegates and researchers, polycrisis is useful when:

• Framing agenda items that cross committee mandates (e.g., climate–security, debt–health).
• Justifying integrated rather than siloed responses in resolutions.
• Analyzing why traditional risk models underestimate compound tail risks.

It is most often invoked in discussions of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, IMF and World Bank debt frameworks, G20 communiqués, and climate-finance negotiations, where actors argue that addressing one crisis in isolation will fail unless interactions with others are accounted for.