The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Science Council recently released Navigating new horizons: A global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing. The report uses the concept of polycrisis to capture the state of the world, drawing directly on the Cascade Institute’s definition. It analyzes eight “critical shifts” and eighteen “signals of change and disruptions” then makes several recommendations (such as a renewed social contract) to advance foresight in governance practices in ways that will more fairly and effectively address these challenges: “governments and international organizations [must] adopt a broad, whole-system perspective, which seeks to understand the interactions between crises and the architectures that link systems globally” (p. 13).
I was recently asked by journalist Sean Mowbray to comment on the report for the article “‘Polycrisis’ threatens planetary health; UN calls for innovative solutions” he just published on Mongabay, and thought I’d share here my full response (from which he quotes twice in the article).
It’s heartening to see more and more organizations engage seriously with the concept of polycrisis, as my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time and effort converting it from a buzzword into an analytical framework that helps us better understand and address interconnected global problems. It’s also flattering to see UNEP draw directly upon our definitions and work in this area.
The report represents a new entry into a growing reporting genre in which organizations enumerate what are, for them, the most pressing risks, trends, and drivers of change, such as the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Reports, the UN Secretary General’s forthcoming risk report, the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends reports, and Eurasia Group’s annual top ten risk lists (to name just a few). Like these other reports, the UNEP report employs expert consultation and large risk perception surveys, which integrate a wide range of opinion but should always be taken with a grain of salt insofar as respondents are subject to availability bias—the tendency to focus on information directly at hand, or most recently in the headlines. The issues highlighted by UNEP are broadly consistent with these other reports (with a few unique additions, such as “privatized micro-environmentalism”—exclusive enclaves of healthy ecosystems—and “exnovation”—discarding outdated ideas, practices, and norms). An important value added of UNEP’s report over others, in my mind, is that it helpfully cross-references issues with the specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) affected.
As it continues to pursue foresight, I’d like to see UNEP specify in greater detail the difference between a “signal of change” and a “disruption,” and how these two categories relate to “critical global shifts,” in order to provide a clearer picture of how all these things relate to comprise processes of change. The current report does not distinguish between disruptions and signals of change, and thus lumps together a hodgepodge of phenomenon from “local, network driven resilience” to “uninhabitable places” to “decisions detached from science” to “carbon offset integrity issues.” It mixes apples and oranges and could better theorize change. At the same time, the report does helpfully note that the signals and disruptions it identifies could be good or bad depending on how they play out and on your particular perspective.
The governance measures recommended by the report—such as institutionalizing inter-generational equity; pursuing a new social contract based in shared values and more realistic measures of wellbeing; and streamlining practices of adaptive and anticipatory governance—are all worthwhile, important, and on the mark. The real challenge is developing practical programs that can achieve these recommendations at local, national, regional, and international scales. Such actions will necessarily be diverse, context-specific, and beset by myriad challenges (from vested interests to deepening polarization). They lie outside the scope of the UNEP report (which can only provide broad outlines), but the report introduces foresight thinking as an essential part of any such initiatives, and that is an important contribution.
My colleague Luke Kemp, soon to be a Visiting Fellow at the Cascade Institute, had a couple more points to add about the report:
Methodologically there isn’t much new, although the scan size is larger than usual. They are a tad unclear about how they included deliberation in the process, what happened in the workshops, and the foresight panel has a lot of gaps (not one person from the polycrisis/systemic risk/catastrophic risk space).
Most of the issues they identify overlap with previous reports (as Mike notes). There are some fairly novel ones such as exnovation (discarding outdated, and inefficient practices and technologies) and space debris (this will also be highlighted in the first Global Catastrophic Risk horizon scan). They do have a scoring system for impact and probability (although I’m a bit skeptical of it). It’s a slightly odd collection, ranging from fairly minor and well-known issues (corruption in carbon markets, which was happening for years under the Kyoto Protocol with both the JI and CDM) to globally consequential ones (solar geoengineeering).
-Michael Lawrence, Polycrisis Fellow