Pandemic, climatic upheavals, inflationary outbreak, war, populist fever… Far from abating, the major crises that are shaking the world seem, for several years, to want only to multiply, when it is not to mix and worsen each other. Welcome to the era of “polycrises”.
“I can remember times when the global economy faced such dire and even graver situations, but this is the most complex, disparate, and cross-cutting set of problems […] I can remember in 40 years of being interested in this kind of thing”, said this fall, in the FinancialTimeseconomist emeritus Larry Summers.
The former US Treasury Secretary was referring, among other things, to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis that war caused, the surge in inflation and the synchronized escalation of central bank interest rates around the world, as well as the urgency of the green transition and the impact of increasingly frequent natural disasters. We could have added other factors that are not always economic, but which can all the same quickly have consequences for the economy, such as the crisis of confidence in democratic institutions, the increasingly uninhibited authoritarianism of several regimes, the growing tension between the West and its former darling China or the debt problems in both rich and poor countries.
In recent months, a word has come up to name this accumulation of global problems: polycrisis. The French sociologist, philosopher and complexity theorist Edgar Morin is said to have been one of the first to use it, a quarter of a century ago, to specifically describe the situation caused by the climate crisis. Former President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker also used it in 2018 to depict the troubled years that Europe had just gone through.
Economic history expert Adam Tooze has recently made himself a leading champion of the phrase. A polycrisis is not just a multitude of crises that occur at the same time, he specifies. It is a situation where the shocks they produce interact with each other in such a way that “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of its parts”.
An interconnected world
It is not the first time, in fact, that the world has been grappling with several serious problems at the same time, our experts admit. For years now, the World Economic Forum in Davos has listed the most serious or probable dangers threatening the planet. Next week again, his Global Risks Report will probably put environmental issues first, to which will be added dozens of other perils, such as the deterioration of social cohesion, involuntary migration, conflicts over access to water or a major technological slippage.
Many of these threats, like problems we are currently facing, are already well understood by experts, observed last month, in an article intended for the press, Michael Lawrence, researcher at the Cascade Institute, a research center specializing in Crisis Convergence and based at Royal Roads University, British Columbia.
There are also specialists capable of understanding the interactions between certain phenomena such as global warming and the economy. “But who would have predicted that a global pandemic would force governments to impose health measures that interact with political polarization, disinformation and radicalization to lead a ‘Freedom Convoy’ and its swastika flags through Ottawa? »
Two important things have changed over the years, explained in November, in the New York Timesthe political scientist and director of the Cascade Institute, Tomas Homer-Dixon. The first is to what extent our way of life today exceeds the limits of what is sustainable on the planet. The second is the scale, speed and complexity of our economic, social and cultural interconnections.
The Canadian researcher thus illustrates the kind of “vicious circle” that can be established between different problems. “Global warming harms people’s health and causes weather disasters that affect infrastructure and food production across the planet. In the poorest countries, these problems limit economic growth and deepen existing inequalities. Lower growth and higher inequality, wherever it occurs, intensify ideological extremism. And this extremism makes it harder to build national and international consensus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which compounds the global warming crisis. »
Complexity… and will
The concept of polycrisis thus implies that we recognize that the world today is more complex and more unpredictable than we like to think, say our experts, but not only that. It is also an invitation to overcome our tendency to think in isolation and to explore the question of the interactions between different phenomena.
And the problem is not always our difficulty in understanding the nature and the interrelations between the dangers which threaten us, recalls Michael Lawrence. “We have, for example, a better scientific understanding of climate change than ever before, in addition to emission reduction targets [de gaz à effet de serre] and action plans. We also know that climate change will aggravate poverty, migration and conflict. In this case, the main problem is not our ignorance, but rather the inaction of our leaders and the maneuvers of powerful interests. »