We are in a polycrisis – the entanglement of crises across multiple, interconnected global systems such as climate, health, and finance – that interact to produce harms significantly greater than the sum of their parts. We propose that, to mitigate and adapt to this polycrisis, strong systemic risk governance is required, and that just and effective governance requires principles. Principles help us to identify common values, provide a framework for decision-making, and lead the necessary societal change towards a shared vision, taking on increasing importance in an ever more complex and fragile world.

We are facing multiple crises, from risks across systems that are central to the safety and prosperity of humanity and ecosystems. Traditional planning and implementation have been based on command-and-control approaches with narrow objectives formulated within a constrained logic model. However, the polycrisis and addressing systemic risk require multiple objectives beyond narrow ones, which cannot address large-scale initiatives in complex, dynamic environments aimed at systems transformation. This requires a deep consideration of what objectives societies and organizations have and how they should meet them. The notion of utilizing a set of guiding principles is critical. Principles are becoming ever more prominent in considerations around the different ways in which societies, organizations, and individuals operate. Principles take on increasing importance in an ever more complex world where our effectiveness depends on adapting to context, guiding adaptation, and facilitating dialogue on options, trade-offs, and choices. We propose a set of 10 principles to guide the development of the field of systemic risk assessment and response within and across multiple domains. These principles – developed to meet the needs of the field of systemic risk – provide a complete set of operating guidelines to drive towards safety, equity, and security for human and ecological systems.

This article proposes 10 principles for systemic risk governance to navigate the polycrisis and ensure a safe future.

Addressing environmental problems like climate change urgently requires the acceleration of sustainability transitions. This Intelligence Briefing explains why this is starting to happen for technical innovations like renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles. Drawing on socio-technical transitions theory, it discusses five acceleration mechanisms that reduce cost, improve performance, change actor orientations, mobilise finance, and increase socio-political support. While not denying their potential relevance, the Briefing also shows that these acceleration mechanisms are not (yet) being activated for social innovations and deep lifestyle change. The Briefing, therefore, also criticises wishful thinking tendencies in some sustainability transformation research strands.

Sustainability transitions should accelerate to address environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. This Intelligence Briefing aims to explain the empirical phenomenon that rapid transitions are starting to happen with regard to several low-carbon technologies (like solar-PV, wind, and electric vehicles), but not with regard to transformative social innovations or lifestyle changes. It identifies and discusses five reasons that help explain this difference: increasing-returns-to-adoption mechanisms; socio-technical feedbacks between technology, actors, and institutions; financial reorientation; issue linkage to wider political goals; and societal acceptance. It further suggests that technical innovations can act as a flywheel or catalyst for subsequent social innovations. And it makes critical comparisons between the socio-technical transitions literature and some approaches in the transformations literature, finding the former more theoretically developed, empirically validated, and policy relevant than the latter for the topic of acceleration.

Low-carbon technologies are starting to accelerate sustainability transitions, while purely social innovations linger.

Continued global environmental degradation generates risks to human health, for example, through air pollution, disease, and food insecurity. This study focuses on these three types of health impact and explores what drives these risks. The risks can arise from diverse causes including political, economic, social, technological, legal/regulatory, and environmental factors. We assembled diverse experts to work together to produce ‘system maps’ for how risks arise, identifying monitoring ‘watchpoints’ to help track risks and interventions that can help prevent them materialising. We critically appraise this pilot methodology, in order to improve our capacity to understand and act to protect human health.

Systemic risks arise through a process of contagion across political, economic, social, technological, legal/regulatory, and environmental systems. The highly complex nature of these risks prevents probabilistic assessment as is carried out for more conventional risks. This study critically explores a new approach based on participatory systems mapping with experts from diverse backgrounds helping to appraise these risks and identify data and monitoring ‘watchpoints’ to track their progress. We focus on three case studies: air quality, biosecurity, and food security. We assembled 36 experts selected in a stratified way to maximise cognitive diversity, plus 14 members of the interdisciplinary project team. Across 7 workshops, we identified 39 ‘risk cascades’, defined as pathways by which systemic risk can have negative impacts on human health, and we identified 681 watchpoints and interventions. We identify a broad range of interventions to reduce risk, exploring systems approaches to help prioritise these interventions; for example, understanding co-benefits in terms of reducing multiple different types of risk, as well as trade-offs. In this paper, we take a reflective approach, critically discussing constraints and refinements to our pilot methodology, in order to enhance capacity to appraise and act on systemic risks.

How can we act on the risks from air pollution, disease, and food insecurity? Insights from a new systemic risk assessment methodology.

Recent geopolitical events remind us of the need for a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. This Commentary argues that a diverse, bottom-up approach is essential to ensure sustainability science progresses, even amid shifting political processes that threaten international collaboration and funding. Locally driven solutions that value diverse perspectives and knowledge systems are vital for resilience. By supporting community-led action, sharing ideas across regions, and recognising that sustainability means different things in different places, we can build a more flexible, inclusive, and resilient path toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in an uncertain world.

Recent geopolitical events provide a stark reminder of the need to build a resilient, global approach to sustainability science. Centralised, top-down models of sustainability science are likely to be vulnerable to disruptions, from pandemics to wars, that threaten progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and jeopardise decades of collaborative advancement that are needed to support future progress. We argue that a decentralised, community-empowered model provides the foundation needed for a resilient sustainability scientific effort. By prioritising local solutions, embracing diverse knowledge systems, and fostering horizontal knowledge exchange, we can create a more resilient and adaptable framework. Sustainability science initiatives need to elevate successful local initiatives, adopt transdisciplinary approaches that include underrepresented knowledge holders, build decentralised knowledge-sharing networks, and recognise that sustainability has different meanings across cultural and geographical contexts.

Decentralised sustainability science: local, diverse, and resilient in a fractious and unpredictable world.

The Earth is approaching irreversible tipping points. Markets, democracy, and technology alone cannot address these complex crises. Future Design (FD) tackles these challenges by activating human ability to prioritise future generations’ happiness over immediate gains. This research expands the FD framework and reviews a decade’s worth of studies, deepening our understanding of FD’s potential in creating mechanisms for long-term societal well-being and environmental sustainability.

The Earth is approaching irreversible tipping points across multiple domains. Despite advances in markets, democracy, and science, these systems systematically fail to prioritise future generations’ well-being – creating what we term ‘future failures’. New mechanisms are needed, such as FD. Originating in Japan in the early 2010s, FD aims to design, experiment with, and implement mechanisms that activate our futurability – the ability to prioritise the happiness of future generations over immediate gains – to tackle future failures. This paper introduces presentability and pastability alongside futurability, extending the FD framework. Placing various FD studies from the past decade within this framework, this study reviews mechanisms for activating these abilities and examines how activating one ability affects the others. These abilities are ‘leverage points’, as defined by Meadows. We explore the path to a paradigm shift by designing and using mechanisms that activate these points. This paper also highlights unknowns about FD and potential directions for its development, providing a comprehensive overview of its current state and future prospects in addressing global challenges.

Future Design: A new approach to global crises, prioritising future generations over immediate gains.

Cities, as complex systems, are faced with increasingly diverse and connected challenges across social, economic, environmental, and health domains. To help cities address these challenges, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a cross-disciplinary urban research agenda through expert elicitations and extensive consultation. Five research themes to guide urban sustainability research were identified including: (1) advancing urban sustainability transformations, (2) ensuring equity, (3) boosting innovation in low to lower-middle income countries, (4) managing complexity and systemic risks, and (5) navigating environmental change. Advancing this agenda will require collaboration across disciplines and geographies, transdisciplinary coproduction, and enhanced support to urban science.

Cities and urban regions are at the forefront of transformations toward global sustainability. As urbanization accelerates, there is increasing demand for cities to play multiple, complex and synthetic roles across social and environmental domains within and beyond their boundaries, for example driving economic development while mitigating and adapting to global environmental changes. To help cities in meeting this challenge, urban science, a rapidly growing field that includes inter- and transdisciplinary research, needs to expand and evolve, with clear priorities. Combining expert elicitation and community consultation, the Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network developed a strategic research agenda for urban science for the next decade. The urban science research agenda describes five critical research themes for scientific advances: (1) accelerate urban sustainability transformations, (2) ensure equity and inclusivity, (3) amplify innovation from the low to lower-middle income countries, (4) negotiate complexity and systemic risks, and (5) navigate environmental change. Under each research theme, we review the state of the art, identify remaining gaps, and outline key research questions needing to be addressed to advance science toward urban transformations. Interconnections across, and enabling conditions to advance, these priority research themes are discussed.

Globally co-designed urban research agenda reveals pressing priorities for sustainability and resilience.

The world is facing multiple interconnected crises, from climate change and economic instability to social inequalities and geopolitical tensions. These crises do not occur in isolation; instead, they interact, reinforce each other, and create unexpected ripple effects – forming what is known as a polycrisis. Traditional ways of analysing problems often fail to grasp these interdependencies, making it difficult to find effective responses. We draw on system archetypes to describe and exemplify three polycrisis patterns. These provide a structured way to analyse how multiple crises unfold and interact, as well as insights into how to navigate such complexity.

The concept of a polycrisis describes the complex interconnections between global issues, which can lead to unexpected emergent behaviours and the possible convergence of undesirable impacts. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for anticipating compounded effects and for identifying leverage points for effective intervention. We propose that system archetypes – generic structures in system dynamics that capture recurring patterns of behaviour – can serve as a useful analytical tool to study polycrises. Specifically, we reinterpret three key system archetypes in this context: Converging Constraints (based on the Limits to Growth system archetype), Deepening Divides (based on Success to the Successful system archetype), and Crisis Deferral (drawing from the Policy Resistance system archetype). These patterns illustrate how resource limitations, structural inequalities, and short-term solutions can sustain or worsen crisis dynamics. Using real-world examples, we show how polycrisis patterns can be employed to map feedback structures between interacting crises and to guide effective interventions. Our work contributes to a more structured and systemic understanding of polycrises, by providing a tool to help researchers and policymakers better anticipate, navigate, and mitigate their effects.

‘Polycrisis patterns reveal how crises like climate change, economic instability, and inequality interact, amplifying their impacts’.