Global Crises Are Entangling in Ways That Amplify Devastation

They Called It a “Polycrisis.” Then They Found Out How It Actually Works.

You are standing in a kitchen, and three pots are boiling over at once. The pasta water is flooding the stove. The sauce is scorching. The kettle is screaming. You grab one pot, but your hand slips because you grabbed the wrong handle. Now the second pot tips. Now the third. In seconds, you are not dealing with three separate problems. You are dealing with one disaster, and the only thing you know for sure is that the sum of the damage is far larger than anything a single pot could have done.

This is the world right now. But the metaphor breaks down fast, because in the real world, the pots are not sitting on the same stove. They are connected by invisible pipes. The heat from one warms the other. The steam from the second triggers a pressure valve in the third. And nobody has a diagram of the plumbing.

A new paper from Michael Lawrence, Thomas Homer Dixon, Scott Janzwood, and Johan Rockström, published in Global Sustainability in 2024, tries to draw that diagram. The authors are not the first to notice that crises are stacking up. The term “polycrisis” has been floating around for years, used by everyone from World Economic Forum panels to Twitter doomscrollers. But Lawrence and his colleagues argue that the word has been hollow. It is a label, not an explanation. So they set out to turn it into a mechanism.

What they found is that crises do not just coincide. They entangle. And the way they entangle follows a logic that, once you see it, changes how you understand everything from food prices to pandemics to war.

The Three Ways Crises Grab Each Other

The paper’s core contribution is a taxonomy of entanglement. Lawrence et al. (2024) identify three causal pathways that connect global crises: common stresses, domino effects, and inter systemic feedbacks. Each one works differently. Each one is visible in the world right now. And each one, the authors argue, makes the whole system more fragile than any single crisis would suggest.

Common stresses are the simplest to grasp. A single slow moving pressure, like rising global temperatures, weakens multiple systems at once. It stresses agriculture, water supply, energy grids, and coastal infrastructure simultaneously. None of these systems are directly linked. But they all share the same underlying vulnerability. When a heat wave hits, the crop fails, the power goes out, and the river runs dry. The crises appear separate. The cause is not.

Domino effects are what you probably imagine when you hear “chain reaction.” One crisis triggers another, which triggers a third. The authors point to Russia’s war on Ukraine as a textbook example. The invasion itself was a fast moving trigger. But it knocked over a series of dominos: energy prices spiked, grain exports collapsed, fertilizer costs soared, and food inflation rippled across Africa and the Middle East. Each domino was a crisis in its own right. But none would have fallen the same way without the first push.

Inter systemic feedbacks are the scariest, because they are the least understood. This is where two or more global systems are linked in a loop. A shock in one system alters the behavior of the other, which then feeds back and amplifies the original shock. Lawrence et al. (2024) give the example of climate change and biodiversity loss. Warmer temperatures stress ecosystems. Weakened ecosystems release more carbon. More carbon drives more warming. The loop tightens. And each iteration makes the next one harder to break.

The authors are careful to say that these pathways are not mutually exclusive. In the real world, they overlap. A common stress can weaken a system just enough that a domino effect topples it. An inter systemic feedback can turn a slow stress into a fast trigger. The polycrisis is not a single event. It is a process.

How a Crisis Is Born: The Trigger and the Stress

Before you can understand how crises connect, you need to understand how a single crisis forms. Lawrence et al. (2024) offer a definition that is deceptively simple. A global crisis occurs when one or more fast moving trigger events combine with slow moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium.

The distinction between trigger and stress matters. A trigger is a shock. A hurricane. A war. A financial crash. It happens fast, and it is visible. A stress is a slow grind. Rising temperatures. Declining groundwater. Growing inequality. It accumulates over years or decades, often without making headlines. The trigger gets the blame. The stress was the real setup.

Think about the COVID 19 pandemic. The trigger was a novel coronavirus, a fast moving biological event. But the stress was decades of underinvestment in public health, fragile supply chains, and a global economy that had optimized for efficiency at the expense of resilience. Lawrence et al. (2024) argue that the pandemic was not just a crisis of the virus. It was a crisis of the systems that the virus exploited.

This framework changes how you evaluate risk. If you only look at triggers, you will always be surprised. The next pandemic will come from a different virus. The next war will start in a different place. But the stresses are predictable. They are the same ones that have been building for years. The question is not whether another trigger will arrive. It is which system is most stressed when it does.

The Pandemic, the War, and the Climate: A Case Study in Entanglement

Lawrence et al. (2024) use three crises to illustrate their framework: climate change, the COVID 19 pandemic, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. These are not random examples. They are the three crises that, in the authors’ words, “have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood.”

The entanglement works in both directions. Consider the pandemic and the war. The pandemic disrupted global supply chains and created labor shortages, which made economies more vulnerable to the energy price shock that followed the invasion of Ukraine. The war, in turn, disrupted grain and fertilizer markets, which drove up food prices in countries already struggling with pandemic induced debt and inflation. The two crises did not just happen at the same time. They fed each other.

Now add climate change. The authors point out that climate related disasters, from floods to wildfires, have strained national budgets and diverted resources away from pandemic response. At the same time, the economic disruption of the pandemic slowed investment in climate adaptation. And the war in Ukraine, by driving up demand for fossil fuels, temporarily reversed progress on emissions. Each crisis made the others worse. None of them can be understood in isolation.

The paper is not predicting doom. It is describing a mechanism. But the mechanism is not reassuring.

What the Research Does Not Prove

The polycrisis framework is powerful, but it has limits. Lawrence et al. (2024) are transparent about what they do not know.

First, the paper is theoretical. It proposes a model of how crises entangle, but it does not test that model with quantitative data. The authors call for more empirical research, but they do not provide it themselves. The case studies are illustrative, not definitive. You can agree with the logic and still want to see the numbers.

Second, the framework is about causal pathways, not about prediction. It tells you how crises connect, but it does not tell you which crisis will hit next or how bad it will be. That is not a flaw in the paper. It is a constraint of the subject. But it means the framework is more useful for diagnosis than for forecasting.

Third, the polycrisis concept risks becoming a catch all. If every crisis is connected to every other crisis, then the term loses its explanatory power. Lawrence et al. (2024) try to avoid this by specifying the three causal pathways. But the temptation to use “polycrisis” as a synonym for “everything is bad” is real. The authors are aware of this. They warn against it.

Finally, the paper does not address the question of agency. If crises are entangled, who is responsible? Who can act? The framework describes a system, but it does not tell you where to apply leverage. That is a question for policymakers, not for theorists. But it is a question that the paper leaves open.

Why This Changes the Conversation

The value of Lawrence et al. (2024) is not that it discovers entanglement. Anyone who has lived through the last five years knows that crises are piling up. The value is that it gives you a vocabulary and a logic for describing how the piling happens.

Before this paper, you might have said that the world feels chaotic. After this paper, you can say that the world is exhibiting a specific pattern of inter systemic feedbacks. That shift matters. It turns a vague anxiety into a testable hypothesis. It turns a feeling into a framework.

The authors are not the first to think about connected crises. Historians have long studied “general crises” like the one that gripped the 17th century. Systems theorists have modeled cascading failures in everything from power grids to financial markets. But Lawrence et al. (2024) bring these threads together in a way that is concrete enough to guide research and flexible enough to apply to new situations.

The paper also has a practical edge. If you understand the three pathways, you can start looking for them. You can ask: Is this crisis being driven by a common stress? Is it a domino effect? Is it an inter systemic feedback? The answer changes how you respond.

A common stress requires a systemic fix. If climate change is weakening agriculture and infrastructure at the same time, you do not solve the problem by patching individual systems. You solve it by addressing the stress.

A domino effect requires containment. If one crisis is knocking over others, you need to break the chain. That might mean stabilizing energy prices before food prices collapse. It might mean insulating vulnerable regions from the fallout of a war.

An inter systemic feedback requires breaking the loop. If two systems are reinforcing each other, you need to intervene at the point of connection. That might mean restoring ecosystems to absorb carbon. It might mean redesigning supply chains to prevent shocks from propagating.

None of these interventions are easy. But they are better than the alternative, which is pretending that crises are random and hoping for the best.

What This Actually Means

The paper by Lawrence et al. (2024) is not a blueprint. It is a map. And like any map, it is only useful if you know how to read it. Here is what the map tells you, in plain terms.

• ▸Stop treating crises as separate events. The pandemic was not just a health crisis. The war in Ukraine was not just a geopolitical crisis. Climate change is not just an environmental crisis. They are entangled. Policies that address one without considering the others will fail, and may make things worse.

• ▸Watch the slow stresses, not just the fast triggers. The next crisis will come from a trigger you cannot predict. But the stress that makes it dangerous is already visible. Pay attention to declining trust in institutions, rising inequality, degraded ecosystems, and fragile supply chains. Those are the real vulnerabilities.

• ▸Look for feedback loops before they tighten. Inter systemic feedbacks are the hardest to reverse because they are self reinforcing. The earlier you identify them, the more leverage you have. If you wait until the loop is tight, you are playing catch up.

• ▸Prepare for cascades, not singular shocks. Domino effects mean that a crisis in one region can ripple across the globe. That does not mean you can predict the exact path. But it does mean you should build buffers. Redundancy, diversity, and slack are not inefficiencies. They are insurance.

• ▸Do not confuse the label with the solution. Calling something a polycrisis does not fix it. The term is a tool for diagnosis, not a cure. The real work is in understanding the specific causal pathways at play and intervening at the points where they can be broken.

The world is not just facing a pile of problems. It is facing a system of problems that are wired together in ways we are only beginning to understand. Lawrence et al. (2024) have given us the wiring diagram. Now we have to decide what to do with it.