The Polycrisis

The increasing interconnectedness of social-ecological systems

coupled with the intensification of environmental pressures and degradation of natural resources has multiplied the frequency and severity of shocks to the economy. These shocks add to the crises already underway, and interact to form a transverse and polymorphic crisis with no temporality of its own, no master plan, no governance and no blueprint response.

The Entangled Shocks and Crises in the Anthropocene Production Ecosystem (ESCAPE) project aims to accelerate and leverage the understanding of how societal shocks are transferred, absorbed, and linked together across space, time, and sectors of society.

In order to bring clarity and robustness to the emerging field of polycrisis research, ESCAPE focuses on

the conceptualisation and formalisation of polycrisis,
the development of a long-term multi-scale database on historical crises,
the exploration of empirical methods to measure the interaction of multiple crises,
the assessment of the gap between the way crises are perceived and the way they develop.

ESCAPE involves a group of international transdisciplinary researchers who aim to accelerate and leverage the understanding of how shocks are transferred, absorbed, and linked together across space, time, and sectors of society.

Co-investigators: Louis Delannoy (GEDB), Peter Søgaard Jørgensen (GEDB, SRC, Anthropocene Laboratory), Ege Pehlivanoglu (GEDB), Jade Houghton (GEDB), Mélis Busson (GEDB), Jean-Charles Leveugle (GEDB), Alexandre Verzier (GEDB).

Collaborators: Magnus Nyström (SRC)

Project leader

Louis Delannoy

PhD, Postdoctoral researcher

louis.delannoy@kva.se

Research for a more robust society