Explaining Polycrisis and Metacrisis

Framing humanity's interconnected crises, existential risk, the prospect of collapse, and differentiating polycrisis vs. metacrisis

Last week, Leah Zaidi and I announced the “Plotting the Polycrisis” workshop for storytellers, which we developed for SXSW 2024. I received some questions about the term, and since it’s going to be a recurring theme on Reality Studies, I wanted to take a moment to explain it, as well as the related notion of the “metacrisis.”

If you’re paying attention to the news, I’d wager you often feel pretty overwhelmed (I certainly do!): climate change, overshoot, rising authoritarianism, misinformation, volatile economies, confusing new technologies, geopolitical tensions and conflict…the list goes on.

A few terms have sprung up to capture the gravity of these crises, including permacrisis, omnicrisis, polycrisis, metacrisis. Permacrisis and omnicrisis tend to emphasize the scale of the problems. Permacrisis gestures to the seeming permanence of existing in a state of global crisis, while omnicrisis most often centers politics and governance within a surrounding environment of crisis.

Polycrisis and metacrisis absorb this sense of scale and add the element of interconnectedness among the seemingly disparate crises—in other words, they take a more overt systems thinking approach to the subject. These two latter terms are the focus of this article.

What is the Polycrisis?

The term "polycrisis" is the oldest of the bunch, and has arguably emerged as the most popular descriptor for the human predicament. Rather than framing each problem in isolation, the polycrisis takes a systems thinking approach, viewing them as interwoven.

A simple polycrisis definition: the simultaneous occurrence and interaction of multiple interconnected crises across various domains, creating a complex and intertwined web of challenges.

“Polycrisis” was originally coined in the 1999 book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium by Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern, referring to a “complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet.” The term ballooned in popularity in 2022, culminating in its foregrounding at Davos 2023.

A more specific definition of polycrisis from the Cascade Institute: any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects.

The important thing to note is that it is not merely that these crises are all occurring simultaneously, but that they exacerbate each other in complex and often unexpected ways; the whole is “greater” than the sum of the parts. Katrina Vanden Heuvel outlines one example of taking a systems thinking approach to a single “crisis”:

Consider the rising price of food. The Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupts leading sources of grain and fertilizer. Drought drains the Mississippi River, endangering distribution of Midwestern crops. Drought in China and low rainfall in India, alongside monsoon floods in Pakistan, threaten rice production. Covid-19 runs rampant through meatpacking plants. Massive mergers reduce competition in food distribution and grocery stores. War, extreme weather, contagion, concentration combine to create a polycrisis. The most vulnerable get hit the worst. Hunger soars in Africa, and at home, the Census Bureau reports that 40 percent of American families struggle to cover the cost of basics—food, gas, housing. Children go to school weak with hunger.

Thus, a systems thinking approach to crisis is more important than mere semantics. By regarding these crises as interconnected, we stand a better chance of accounting for emergent properties (which I define here)—and possibly addressing them in ways that don’t subsequently generate spillover problems that we didn’t account for, as well as doing the necessary foresight work to map out possible futures.

Image: WEF Global Risks Report

For a deeper understanding of the history of the term polycrisis, I recommend the “What Is a Global Polycrisis? And how is it different from a systemic risk?” report from The Cascade Institute.

What is the Metacrisis?

“Metacrisis,” meanwhile, is a newer term that has come into popular usage through the sensemaking community—foremost by Tristan Harris, Terry Patten, Jonathan Rowson, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Zak Stein.

Metacrisis vs. Polycrisis

Metacrisis overlaps with polycrisis in viewing collective crises through the lens of systems thinking, but differentiates itself in addressing the social dynamics and affective experience of crisis—the way these interconnecting crises feel to us, what this does to our psyches (individually and collectively), how it impacts our ability to live meaningful lives, and how all of that generates unexpected emergent properties. From the Civilization Research Institute (CRI):

Critically, metacrisis points to a deeper pattern that connects all risks and crises into a single coherent field: an ecosystem of crisis dynamics, with its own emergent properties. It points too towards the human experience, to the complexity and increasing confusion at the heart of how we all perceive, understand and operate across the field of converging risks. The metacrisis is a higher-order whole, with unique dynamics and unforeseen consequences. The metacrisis is both seen and unseen, taking place above and below the surface of what is visible and obvious.

CRI also situates the metacrisis as a historical epoch, citing its formation with the development of nuclear weapons, which gave humanity the capability of deciding the fate of all life on Earth. Thus, they explain:

In the broadest historical terms, the metacrisis can be understood as a dangerous transitional period from the current global civilization, to something new and uncertain … If humanity survives, it will be because a world system emerges that is capable of navigating the metacrisis. This will require, among other things, changing the deep-seated social dynamics that are generative of global catastrophic and existential risks.  

Where polycrisis has evolved over the past two decades and slowly solidified into consensus usage, the relatively recent development of metacrisis means that its meaning will likely morph depending on how it is applied (and by whom) in the years to come.

I see the ongoing polycrisis, as well as the feelings associated with collapse via metacrisis, as expressions of Postreality, the contemporary reality paradigm. Both terms offer a means of understanding the contemporary predicament using systems thinking—and both make clear that resilience, adaptation, collaboration, regenerative approaches, and antifragility will be key characteristics to minimizing harm in the near and far futures. Furthermore, I actually think it’s helpful that we have these two separate-but-related terms, as they will likely appeal to different folks for diffferent reasons (and for that reason I use both depending on context).

I will be covering the above in more detail in the months to come. For those attending SXSW 2024, here’s the official link for the “Plotting the Polycrisis” session. If that sounds like your cup of tea, “Favorite” it so it shows up in your calendar. Looking forward to seeing you in Austin!

Update: since this was published, Michael J. Albert published Navigating the Polycrisis (MIT Press), which captures some of the issues related to polycrisis in more depth, and proposes “planetary systems thinking,” a new theoretical framework for critical futures analysis.

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