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Dear Colleague

In this month's newsletter
  • The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences ticking Doomsday Clock
  • WEF Risk Report and Polycrises
  • UN Global Assessment and Organizational Behaviour
  • Organisational Behaviour and the Humanitarian Futures Toolkit
  • Risk Reduction and Global Governance Innovation
  • 2023 Futures and Risk Management

Something very positive is afoot. The prospect of plausible longer-term disaster risks is now being acknowledged by more and more governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations as well as the private sector. Given what most likely will be an exponential increase in such threats, one has to be grateful that at long last there is a growing willingness to recognise that fact. 

This was clearly evident when former Presidents of The Elders, Mary Robinson and Elbegdorj Tsakhia, joined members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for the unveiling of the Doomsday Clock on 24 January.

The clock had moved to 90 seconds to midnight – the closest it has been to catastrophe since its creation in 1947. That Doomsday clock was ticking and The Elders’ representatives called for global political leaders to adopt a mindset that could generate the urgent action needed to address the existential threats facing humanity, including the climate crisis, pandemics and nuclear weapons.

Of course, the World Economic Forum is not new when it comes to assessing future risks. It has done so for 18 years. This year, however, its Global Catastrophic Risks report underscored the point that we will be facing a set of plausible threats that will shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come. These future risks are well described, and the abiding messages are several, but here, let’s focus on one. 

The WEF report anticipates that

deeply interconnected risks and eroding resilience are giving rise to the risk of polycrises – where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part. Eroding geopolitical cooperation will have ripple effects across the global risks landscape over the medium term, including contributing to a potential polycrisis of interrelated environmental, geopolitical and socio-economic risks relating to the supply of and demand for natural resources. 

WEF’s use of the terms, polycrises and polycrisis to explain plausible future risks has generated doubts about some of the assumptions underpinning such dystopic analyses.  One example is that posited by Tuft University’s Daniel W. Drezner.

He questions the general proposition that major global threats are irreversible – are ‘concatenation of shocks that generate crises that trigger crises in other systems that, in turn, worsen the initial crises, making the combined effect far, far worse than the sum of its parts.’

Those who react against the implications of those two terms – polycrises and polycrisis -- do so because conceptually they see a fatal flaw. Principally, they rale against the assumption that one systemic crisis will automatically exacerbate stresses in other systems. 

Indeed, notes Drezner, over the last year there have been at least two examples of one systemic crisis actually lessening stress on another system:

"China’s increasingly centralized autocracy generated a socio-economic disaster in the form of “zero Covid” lockdowns. Xi Jinping kept that policy in place long after it made any sense, accidentally throttling China’s economy. The timing of China’s lockdown was fortuitous, however, as stagnant Chinese demand helped prevent an inflationary spiral from getting any worse. China’s exit from zero-Covid will likely also be countercyclical, jump-starting economic growth at a time when other regions tip into recession.

Another weird, fortuitous interaction has been the one between climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Europe aided Ukraine and resisted Russia’s blatant, illegal actions, Russia retaliated by cutting off energy exports. Many were concerned that Russia’s countersanctions would make this winter extremely hard and expensive for Europe."

The debate is important, and ultimately the outcome will go a long way towards framing the strategies needed for anticipating and adapting to future threats. However, the debate in no way ignores a fundamental and burgeoning reality – namely, the types, dimensions and dynamics of global threats are increasing and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future… and yet all too many organisations that should have the capacity to deal with them, don’t. 

That assumption underpinned the United Nations 2022’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction: Our World at Risk (GAR-2022) has become one of the mainstays of the September 2023 Summit of the Future preparatory ministerial meeting, proposed by the UN Secretary-General on 3 February 2023.

In the report, the Secretary-General makes clear that disasters, economic loss and the underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk, including poverty and inequality are increasing ‘just as ecosystems and biospheres are at risk of collapse. Global systems are becoming more interconnected and therefore more vulnerable in an uncertain risk landscape.’

One essential solution for dealing with potentially existential threats goes to the very dangers posed by organisational behaviour. As Humanitarian Futures has noted frequently in the past, the GAR-2022 reaffirms the vital importance of finding means to get policy planners and decision-makers to recognize that their approaches to risks and global threats all too often reflect their innate biases and mental short cuts, leading to myopic thinking, inertia and oversimplification and ‘groupthink’.

Ways to address these issues can be found in the Humanitarian Futures Toolkit

Even when confronted with clear scientific evidence, sound decisions about threats are frequently ignored or not considered, and action only occurs at the brink of crises.

Such failings would seem to account for the sorts of recommendations made ten months ago by an impressive group of experts leading to the Global Policy Dialogue on Global Governance Innovation: Beyond UN75 & Our Common Agenda (GPD) 

Here again, in anticipation of the 2023 Futures Summit, the experts posited an extensive range of recommendations, and in light of the all too evident organisational failings in the risk community, the GPD suggested that a position of Special Envoy for Future Generations needs to be created to make clear the sorts of threats that continue to be ignored or downplayed. They, too, stressed the importance of creating an international Futures Lab to make up for the lack of updated and reliable data and widespread misinformation. 

The proposed data portal by the Futures Lab would assist in building a collective data collection and analysis capacities across the globe. (Here, our readers might recall similar concerns and solutions raised by the OECD, discussed in HF’s 4 December 2021 Newsletter: Building Effective Risk Management, Strategy and Response: The case for building relations between scientists and policy planners.)

As one heads towards the September 2023 Summit of the Future preparatory meeting, it is gratifying to see the efforts already underway by the UN’s coordinating body – the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 

In a November 2022 draft report, OCHA recognised that the international community still struggles to act even before predictable crises as well as over longer-term time frames to mitigate impacts. Without anticipatory capacities, it stressed, the sector will not have the agility, ability or skillsets to respond to what inevitably will be a growing number of crises around the world. For that reason, one of OCHA’s five core functions will be to develop policies for the longer-term through greater attention to trends analysis and foresight.

Will that be enough? No, not at all. But, at least it reflects an awareness about the changing nature of humanitarian threats, and a willingness to promote means to anticipate them. Whether the message will be able to alter the organisational behaviour patterns of so many with humanitarian roles and responsibilities remains uncertain. At least OCHA seems to have taken important steps forward and certainly it would seem that more and more organisations appreciate the reasons why.

As the new year unfolds, don’t hesitate to let us know if there are other pertinent futures-oriented humanitarian issues that you would like us to consider; or, should you wish to have your own views and ideas carried in the HF Newsletter, please do contact us.

In the meantime, all our very best from The Humanitarian Futures team. We remain so very grateful for your continuing interest and involvement in HF’s work


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