What happens when a cascade of crises collide?

IT SEEMS as if the world is encountering a “perfect storm” of simultaneous crises: The coronavirus pandemic is approaching the end of its third year, the war in Ukraine is threatening to go nuclear, extreme climate events are afflicting North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, inflation is reaching rates unseen in decades and authoritarianism is on the march around the world. But the storm metaphor implies that this simultaneity is an unfortunate and temporary coincidence — that it’s humanity’s bad luck that everything seems to be going haywire all at once.

In reality, the likelihood that the current mess is a coincidence is vanishingly small. We’re almost certainly confronting something far more persistent and dangerous. We can see the crises of the moment, but we’re substantially blind to the hidden processes by which those crises worsen one another — and to the true dangers that may be enveloping us all.

Today’s mess is better understood as a global polycrisis, a term the historian Adam Tooze at Columbia has recently popularised. The term implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises. Precisely because these crises are so entangled, they’re causing worldwide damage much greater than the sum of their individual harms.