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Both adaptive and transformative capacities are necessary to navigate global polycrisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2026

Peter Søgaard Jørgensen*
Affiliation:
Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere, Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm, Sweden Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Anthropocene Laboratory, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden
Louis Delannoy
Affiliation:
Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere, Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm, Sweden
Sofia Maniatakou
Affiliation:
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Carl Folke
Affiliation:
Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere, Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm, Sweden Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Anthropocene Laboratory, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden
Michele-Lee Moore
Affiliation:
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Centre for Global Studies and Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
Per Olsson
Affiliation:
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
*
Corresponding author: Peter Søgaard Jørgensen; Email: peter.sogaard.jorgensen@su.se

Abstract

Non-technical summary

Efforts toward global sustainability transformations risks being undermined by the formation of a global polycrisis, where multiple global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical conflict, and pandemics interact to reinforce each other. Resilience scholarship has identified multiple capacities needed for adaptation and transformation of social-ecological systems. Here, we explore the leverage and vulnerability of such capacities to the global polycrisis. We find that many capacities have both and their development and expression can therefore be thought of as being in a direct coevolutionary struggle with the development of a global polycrisis.

Technical summary

Social and environmental challenges are combining to form a complex of crises with potential to delay or reset many sustainability efforts. These risks raise questions about what capacities will be needed for advancing sustainability during a time of global polycrisis. Here, we evaluate the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities – collectively, resilience capacities – for navigating the polycrisis. Specifically, we perform a rapid assessment of their potential for addressing the 14 recently proposed Anthropocene traps. We find that 10 of the 14 Anthropocene traps have characteristics that challenge in total 17 of 23 adaptive and transformative capacities. On the other hand, 10 of 23 capacities – with an overrepresentation of transformative capacities – have general potential to prevent formation and progress of traps. Coevolutionary struggles between the expression of a capacity and the progression of traps are widespread. Importantly, transformative and adaptive capacities complement each other in the types of Anthropocene traps they most frequently address, with transformative capacities targeting global traps and adaptive capacities the emergent structural traps related to connectivity and pace of change. We end by proposing five unifying processes that can serve as an organizing framework for consideration of other sustainability and crisis capacities.

Social media summary

Adaptive and transformative capacities complement each other in navigating a global polycrisis.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Table 1. The 14 Anthropocene traps from Søgaard Jørgensen et al. (2024a)

Figure 1

Table 2. Sets of adaptive and transformative capacities (Folke et al., 2003; ML Moore et al., 2014)

Figure 2

Figure 1. Relationships between Anthropocene traps and adaptive capacities (left) and transformative capacities (right). Relationship as defined in methods.

Figure 3

Figure 2. Pairwise relationships between capacities (A – Adaptive, T – Transformative) and traps (Gl – Global, Tc – Technological, Tm – Temporal, Co – Connectivity). Capacities with a general potential to prevent the formation and progression of traps are indicated in bold and with an asterisk (*). Clustering is based on binary categories of enabling capacities and undermining traps, respectively. Capacities (traps) situated closer to each other are more similar in the individual traps (capacities) they can address (undermine).

Figure 4

Table 3. Organizing capacities in five groups of evolutionary processes and trade-offs

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