Adapt
Hope in the Face of the Polycrisis
Part two in our four-part series: “Local Organizing in a Polycrisis Era”
Overview
According to many historians, it is currently the best time to be alive in all of human history. We live longer, we are on average wealthier, we eat better, and are more educated. Yet, many of us wake up each morning overwhelmed by the current or looming crises of our time. Climate change, threats to democracies across the world, wars, a growing wealth gap, deep disparities in health and well-being, mass extinction, mass migration – the list goes on. These large, evolving, and often interconnected, crises are known as a polycrisis. (For a full description of the polycrisis, please see the first article in this four-part series here.)
In many ways, we can see the level of angst, anger, and anguish people feel as a concern that we are going to lose our grip on the progress that has been made. We don't see the same future for our children as we had for ourselves. This general pessimism worsens as it is paired with the decline of the traditional protective factor of constructive community and a sense of belonging. As a result, here in America, we see increased rates of loneliness, suicide, drug overdoses, houselessness, and more. To make it all worse, the veil of protection that is our personal resilience also wears thin, frequently pierced by overstimulation, social media addiction, and increased mental and behavioral health problems: all symptoms of the chronic hecticness of contemporary life.
Yet, the yearning for more connection lives deep within so many of us – something needs to fill the void of community that neighbors, libraries, churches, and bowling alleys used to fill. The level of appreciation for and participation in these spaces and others like them is at a historical low. In this fast-paced, digitized, globalized era, civil society has become largely disengaged from meaningful public connection. Yet, we too yearn for a better world – a world where the daily news doesn't sink our hearts or boil our blood, where we see a better future for the children we know and love, a world whose leaders can get their act together and solve problems. And in the same breath of thought, we step around a person suffering from drug addiction and homelessness, hoping their eyes don't meet ours. We decline the invitation to join a PTA conversation about our kid's school, or we succumb to the depths of Netflix on a small screen instead of calling a friend or loved one. These common paradoxes of the heart are reflections of our disjointed society.
Yet, taking a step back, we see that humanity has demonstrated incredible resilience and ability to adapt in the face of past and present crises. The historical catastrophes, from the bubonic plague to World War II, that have caused the most human harm and suffering take the form of volcanic eruptions, pandemics, wars, and genocides. Despite immense losses where as many as 90% of populations have died, communities have demonstrated resilience. Recent crises related to war, natural disaster, and economic downturn also illustrate varying degrees of recovery influenced by factors like good governance and economic diversification. (These catastrophes are explored in a separate report available upon request.) Understanding these events can help us put our current crises in perspective. They remind us that no matter what we are up against, the planet will survive, humanity will prevail, and the crises we face will force us to find ways to live and work that will slowly bring back equilibrium for people and the planet. Ultimately, humankind’s capacity to endure and rebuild offers lessons and hope for how we can prepare for and overcome the polycrisis that looms before us.
In this essay, we want to share some positive news: we can find hope from how we came out of past calamities, and learn to build more resilient communities. In short, while volumes of books are available on how we can prevent these looming social and environmental crises from occurring, little has been done to help us understand how we can best get back to a healthy state for ourselves, our families, and our community when one or more of these crises inevitably visits our doorstep. We need to invest in strategies that will help us adapt and be resilient in the face of these and other disasters, some of which could be much worse than we can imagine. The following essay illuminates several common risk and protective factors that can work to respectively catalyze or mitigate the effects of inevitable crises. The types of action we support and invest in now will make a huge difference in our ability to remain resilient in the face of the impending collapse. This includes investing in 1) systems that fairly select leaders and hold them accountable, 2) civic capacity, and 3) collaborative problem-solving. The polycrisis is inevitable, but fallout is not. By learning from the past, uplifting shared humanity, and investing in protective factors at a community level, we can come out of this not only stronger, but more united.
Reflections on Human Crises
Historically, the leading causes of mass disruption across the world can be boiled down to the following threats: disease, economic mismanagement, environmental changes (natural and human-made), and violence (typically in relation to authoritarianism or fascism).
In general, we see that resilient communities facing a similar crisis as communities that are not resilient recover more quickly, and when they do, they often experience a successive period of innovation (see Figure 1). At the same time, those communities that face continued downward pressures from negative forces take much longer to recover. These communities may have to adapt to a new place of equilibrium and work to thrive within those constraints.
Figure 1. Relationship between the magnitude of a crisis and the time it takes to recover for resilient and nonresilient communities compared to those facing chronic external pressures.
Before we explore what makes a community more or less resilient, it is important to summarize the major threats communities face based on the history of the events that caused the greatest suffering and loss of life.
Primary Threats
When we look at the worst of the worst disasters in human history, we see four major causes to the loss of life and human suffering. We describe these as primary threat types. These primary threat types are the initial stressors that impact people and primarily come from outside society, at least at the local level. They are largely external and unforeseen.
Environmental Disasters: Changing climate, volcanic eruptions, acute natural disasters (earthquake, flood, tornado, storm, solar flares, extreme heat), drought, natural resource loss, soil erosion (e.g., dust bowl), contamination, etc.
Disease: Deadly pandemics like the black plague caused centuries of suffering in some areas and the hollowing out of entire communities and societies. Even relatively mild epidemics or pandemics can have major effects on society.
Economic: Recessions, depressions, market crashes, affordability crises, critical loss of an economic sector.
War and violent hostility: Continuous tensions both within and across national borders, leading to mass atrocities and full-scale war. These are often accompanied by authoritarian or fascist governments.
Impacts
The largest impacts to people can be measured by the the following grim indicators:
Death and injury
Suffering and lack of well-being: includes isolation, behavioral health, trauma
Increased poverty
Erosion of social fabric
Reduced quality of life
Increased disparities
Lack of basic human needs, including food, housing, employment, and safety
These impacts manifest both as collective traumas, as well as individual difficulties ranging in duration and severity. In the midst of a crisis, even those not directly impacted are likely to experience a shift in cultural norms toward fear, uncertainty, and hopelessness.
Our Current Polycrisis
While its effects look different from place to place, no country in the world is immune to the current and incoming effects of the polycrisis. A brief and simplified definition of the polycrisis, sometimes called the metacrisis, comes from Omega Resilience Funders Network (ORFN), which calls it “the sum total of all stressors affecting planetary health.” A more detailed definition is articulated by The Cascade Institute:
A global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.
Below is a brief summary of our current polycrisis using the four primary threat types identified from the historical analysis above and how they intersect with each other.
Environmental Disasters: We brace for the crisis to worsen in the coming years. Extreme weather events, ranging from prolonged droughts and heat waves to episodic floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and more, will prove deadly across all geographies. With increased resource scarcity, desertification, rising sea levels, agricultural collapse, and other changes in our natural ecosystems, comes an increased risk of intergroup conflict, as well as economic fallout. Associated shifts in migration patterns and the spread of disease will only exacerbate these conflicts, potentially leading to violent hostility and war.
Disease: The COVID pandemic has been a devastating warning of what’s to come with infectious disease. We are all well aware of the harm diseases can wreak on people, families, and society, but as with environmental disasters, the impact of public crises extends far beyond physical and mental symptoms. Governmental responses can have major economic consequences, as well as create geopolitical rifts concerning how blame and aid are distributed across borders. Additionally, deaths from noncommunicable diseases like heart disease and cancer dwarf infectious diseases, annually killing about 18 million and 10 million people, respectively. Poor mental health and drug addiction are skyrocketing, leading to direct deaths as well as an increase in gun violence across America.
Economic Crises: Amid the inflation crisis, where basic goods have become increasingly unaffordable to ordinary workers, memories of the Great Recession linger. Despite signs of recovery, people remain unsettled, struggling to regain stability while fearing future economic downturns. Many have not recovered from the economic losses, especially as affordable housing remains elusive nationwide. Concerns persist about widening wealth gaps, the U.S. social security system's stability, and mounting global debts. Meanwhile, the migrant crisis reflects broader economic challenges in the global South, prompting migration northward and exacerbating societal tensions and isolationist tendencies.
War and Violent Hostility: In addition to a steady increase in intrastate violence, warfare has become an expected part of the daily news. The potential use of nuclear weapons heightens with the global tide of authoritarianism and aggressive occupations such as Russia in Ukraine. Regional conflicts, including those in Gaza, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Sahel Region, threaten to expand outward, bringing with them new geopolitical questions regarding alliances, aid, and global power dynamics. All of this calls the legitimacy of American global leadership into question, especially as it struggles at home to contain civil violence. A horrific rise in community violence along with targeted and mass shootings leave many Americans feeling unsafe in their own communities, neighborhoods, and schools, regardless of geography.
Being Resilient in the Face of the Polycrisis
The central question of this essay is to understand what societies and communities can do to recover in the face of the crises we are sure to face, whether those be climate change, disease, economic calamity, or war. The research makes it clear that there are both protective factors that work to prevent and mitigate conflict in communities as well as risk factors that, if unaddressed, only aggravate tensions. If communities work on reducing the risk factors and investing in protective factors, they will not only be more likely to recover from crises faster, but will also have the opportunity to grow from them and thrive in a new way.
Protective Factors for Societal Resilience in the Face of Crisis:
When we look at the structure of societies and communities, several characteristics are critical to ensure the ability to adapt and recover in the face of a major crisis.
Trust: Perhaps one of the greatest protective factors in our ability to overcome, or at least mitigate, the effects of crisis is trust. Trust in our community, institutions, information sources, and leaders is an indicator that the civic fabric is strong and that people will work together to recover from the crisis event. Trust is the glue that holds societies together. When it begins to erode, as we have seen in past years, so does the social fabric that binds us together. Because of this, there has been a growing interest in trust as an indicator of social cohesion and belonging. This does not mean blind trust, but trust grounded in demonstrated effectiveness and accountability.
Community Civic Capacity: Civic capacity refers to the collective capability of a community to actively and effectively engage in public affairs, facilitating meaningful participation, collaboration, and problem-solving across diverse groups to address and overcome community challenges. There are key elements of civic capacity that indicate a community can work together to adapt and be resilient in the face of a crisis. On the individual level, there must be a strong sense of belonging which stems from feeling like a valued member of the community, engaging in civic life, and having pride in the community to which you belong. This “local patriotism” is typically bolstered by the sense that there is a long-term vision for the community and that it will be better for future generations. Strong arts, culture, community events, and gathering places further strengthen the capacity. An initial look at history indicates that communities with a strong sense of identity and culture are more likely to thrive even when met with major negative forces. Such communities have a resilient network of trust among community members and across sectors, which in turn allows for the community to come together to solve problems with civility and inclusivity. When community members feel like they are a part of something, even if it’s just in their local area, this creates a sense of purpose and possibilism – a hope for the future that can translate to more involvement with bigger issues. Community capacity is a protective factor because it allows people to come together and form grassroots, intimate networks, which are the foundation of change. It perpetuates civility over fear and distrust. Most importantly, it allows people to create and act on a vision for future generations that is better than the current situation.
Fairly Selected and Accountable Leadership: An investment in re-establishing trust in leaders, political processes, elections, and the institutions that uphold society is critical if we are to come together to take on any aspects of the polycrisis. It is critical that leaders are chosen fairly by the community and that they are accountable to the community. For democratic communities, this means free and fair elections. Structural reforms to reduce the influence of money, stop gerrymandering, and ensure that the outcome of the vote is reflective of the will of the people, provide an opportunity to bolster the sense of fairness and avoid gaming of the system. Leaders can further build trust and accountability through a collaborative leadership style that brings in the community, especially to solve critical weak points in a community’s resilience.
Reliable Information: Having an ecosystem of information sources (e.g., television, radio, social media, text alerts, and tornado warning alarm systems) that is trustworthy, unbiased, and accessible to the mainstream public serves as a protective factor for community resilience. When community members have access to media that promotes collaboration and encourages contribution, rather than exaggerating the things that divide us, empowerment and resilience are fed. Healthy, constructive, and impartial media that encourages collaboration and contribution to civil society is a foundational protective factor. It generates the narrative that we all play a role in making things better and works to bring us together rather than drive us apart. In addition, when a crisis arises, having this built-in trust will mean people know where to turn to understand the issue, get help, and support each other.
Functional Infrastructure and Institutions: Infrastructure includes roads, bridges, stormwater systems, water supply, electricity, and high-speed internet. In addition, it includes the broader environment — trees on Main Street that are lit up during the holidays, walking trails, parks, and community character are also important parts of a community’s infrastructure. The built environment can encourage walking and biking or require driving everywhere. It can secure attainable and affordable housing and determines how close living centers are to work centers or public transportation. The built environment is a critical factor in ensuring a high quality of life and a sense of community, and can also add to a community’s resilience during times of crisis. In order to support this infrastructure as well as basic livability, functional institutions are needed. These institutions need to be responsive to community needs and accountable to those they serve. In short, communities need functional, adaptive, and efficient institutions and infrastructure that meet the needs of the people.
Education: Having a strong education system and an educated workforce can be key to keeping families committed to a community and attracting an array of companies. For smaller communities, a regional approach is often used and some communities offer scholarships or other incentives for residents to come back after college. Education is foundational and directly benefits community resilience by impacting civic capacity. It provides the knowledge and skills necessary for effective participation in public affairs and builds critical thinking, which can help fight misinformation and hold power brokers accountable.
Economic Diversity: Studies are clear that economic diversity is a key factor in community resiliency. Having a diversified economy and the ability to innovate means that when economic times are tough, the crashing of one industry will not mean the crashing of the whole community. Such diversity also means a variety of skill sets and perspectives, which are important in solving complex problems.
Meeting Basic Needs: Another protective factor relates to the distribution of resources in a society. When community members have their basic needs met, they unlock more time and energy to participate in larger, perhaps less urgent matters. When community members are occupied with overwhelming challenges such as food insecurity, poverty, houselessness, unsafe environments, and unemployment, they cannot be expected to participate in things like civic engagement to mitigate climate change, authoritarianism, nuclear proliferation, or other facets of the polycrisis.
In addition to the factors that a community can work on at the local level, there are two additional protective factors to consider.
Relationships with Neighboring Communities, States, and Countries: Good relationships with neighboring communities or countries is of critical importance. Whether it’s sharing water resources in times of drought, trade during times of scarcity, or avoiding violence, being a good neighbor and cultivating good relationships with one’s neighbors is critical. Adversarial relationships lead to downward pressures that are a drain to recovery. Furthermore, many solutions require regional approaches and partnerships between communities, states, or countries. This means that communities cannot be isolationist and need to consider how their actions contribute to the broader regional, state, country, and even global situation.
Inner Resilience: For any of this to happen, the critical first step pertains not to some external problem, but to individuals cultivating strong inner resilience or resources that allow the human nervous system to regulate back to homeostasis during times of crisis. This may look different for each individual. For some it may be meditation or breathing techniques, while for others it may be exercise, playing music, playing a game, or throwing a pot on a wheel. It could be as simple as taking a bath or spending time with family. For many who experience crises on a day-to-day basis because of lived experience or professional work, more intense mental health and coping support may be needed. With the speed and severity of crises around us increasing year by year, it is imperative that we individually learn how to process difficult information and regulate our nervous systems in the face of chaos. We must also learn how to hold space for differing opinions, which are critical to a healthy society. These inner resources protect us not only from succumbing to overwhelming fear and anxiety but also from creating more conflict by reacting from a place of impulse and emotion.
Risk Factors for Societal Decline in the Face of Crisis
Communities and societies can also face greater risk if they have specific characteristics. These characteristics not only impede the speed at which communities can recover but often lead to responses that actually feed the crises, further impacting residents and society.
Of course, the converse of each of the protective factors above are risk factors. Communities are in trouble when a crisis hits even if they only have one of the following characteristics:
A lack of trust
Leaders who are unfairly selected and are unaccountable to the people
Broad misinformation
A disengaged and apathetic public that don’t feel like they belong
Crumbling infrastructure and dysfunctional institutions
An uneducated populace
Economic reliance on a limited number of industries or companies
Too many people who are unsafe, unhoused, unemployed, and unfed
Competition or hostility with neighboring communities.
A lack of personal, internal resilience
In addition to these, three critical indicators that a community or society lacks resilience are:
Culture of blame: A culture of blaming others for problems tends to lead to increased rates of division and othering. Blame leads to dehumanization, which erodes the fabric of trust within societies. This same trait of blame is considered by the Department of Justice as the number one contributor to people perpetrating targeted violence and mass shootings as well as terrorist organizations. A culture of blame means criminals don’t take responsibility to do better and society doesn’t take responsibility for providing opportunity to all. Scapegoating of entire groups of people not only exacerbates political polarization, but has been the historic cause of many wars, genocides, and crimes against humanity. One of the key ways to identify a culture of blame is to examine the level of division and prejudice in a society. It is easier to win power by tapping into people’s fears. This approach divides a society just when we should be pulling together to solve our challenges. A divided house cannot stand is a popular saying because it is true, but in the battle for control, too often we see division as a tool to gain power.
Poor governance: While dictatorships are certainly a sign of poor government, there are other pernicious and perhaps less obvious signals of poor governance. There is robust research on this which we do not have the space to detail here. For our purposes, poor governance is reflective when leaders do not have accountability to the people they are meant to serve and therefore can abuse their power. They often work to divide a populous, exploiting the vulnerabilities of citizens by promising that allegiance to their regime ensures a future of prosperity and wealth.
Over-Centralization: Centralized power is a key indicator of authoritarian regimes and it is also an indicator that a society is not resistant to change. In a society that allows for many experiments, innovative solutions emerge. The United States’ seal reads E pluribus unum (out of many, one), demonstrating the wisdom our founders had along with their fear of over-centralization. Societies that are over-centralized and overly reliant on government are at risk of making grave errors that will lead to catastrophic results for their people, and have the opportunity to oppress and control rather than help them thrive.
It is our collective responsibility to be proactive in addressing these underlying risk factors in our society. Only by identifying and mitigating them can we hope to come together on a community level and be resilient in the face of the primary threats posed by the polycrisis.
Conclusion
While we will undoubtedly face future crises at both the global and local levels, there are key actions that communities can take to help them adapt and bounce back from crises:
Invest in the community’s civic capacity.
Ensure leaders are elected fairly and are accountable to the public.
Determine community weak spots and work collaboratively with the community to solve them, be they diversifying the economy, reducing the risk of natural disasters, building better relationships with neighboring communities or countries, supporting local communication and information systems, improving the educational system, or ensuring basic human needs are met. These problems are typically too big for one government, nonprofit, company, or foundation to solve. They require the community's collective effort and wisdom.
These strategies can only work if we face each day honestly and with mutual respect rather than gamesmanship for power. That means we must wake up each day with the will to meaningfully engage – with who we can, when we can, where we can. We must lean into healing the world, making it a better place from the ground up. To do so means honestly assessing what lies before us. Blaming others for taking away opportunities or past wrongs will not yield long-term rewards, nor will shifting the responsibility to other, “larger” players. The polycrisis will undoubtedly affect everyone on Earth. We all have a role to play in the fight to make sure our families, communities, and nations are not only able to withstand the pressures but hopefully develop something even better along the way.
Our social fabric may have cuts and tears, but it is strong – stronger than any threat that could hope to divide us. History shows that time and time again, we have bounced back from even the most devastating of catastrophes. Humans are resilient; when united by a shared vision for a better world, there is nothing we cannot overcome. Our aim is that with these tools, we can create a ladder of hope for our daily lives. We can overcome deep divisions and work together to overcome the challenges we face now and into the future. In a community ready to face and adapt to our darkest days, we can also live our daily lives without hypocrisy. We can feel the urge to connect, to look that person we think is so different from us in the eye and share a smile, and maybe we can even call a friend or loved one because we have the mental space to share a little hope.
References:
Community Resiliency
David D. Chrislip, David MacPhee, and Patti Schmitt: "Developing a civic capacity index: measuring community capacity to respond to civic challenges." International Journal of Public Leadership 19.1 (2022): 14-30.
Sachit Mahajan, Carina I. Hausladen, Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, Marcin Korecki, and Dirk Helbing: “Participatory resilience: Surviving, recovering and improving together” (2022).
Janette Hartz-Karp and Hans-Peter Meister: “Creating Resilient Cities Through Empowered, Deliberative Participation.” (2011)
Simon McDonnell, Pooya Ghorbani, Courtney Wolf, Maria Jessa Cruz, David M. Burgy, Swati Desai, Daniel Berkovits, and Renata Silberblatt: “A managed-participatory approach to community resilience: The case of the New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program” (2018)
Research shows that resilient communities are best achieved through active public participation, informed by local input. However, post-disaster strategies in the United States …
Sheridan Truesdale and Jesse Paul Spearo: ”Contemporary community resilience: Successes, challenges, and the future of disaster recovery” (2017)
Judith C Kulig, Dana S Edge, Ivan Townshend, Nancy Lightfoot, and Bill Reimer: “Community resiliency: Emerging theoretical insights” (2013)
Brian Mayer: “A Review of the Literature on Community Resilience and Disaster Recovery” (2019)
David Matarrita-Cascante, Bernardo Trejos, Hua Qin, Dongoh Joo, and Sigrid Debner: “Conceptualizing Community Resilience: Revisiting Conceptual Distinctions” (2022)
Sonny S. Patel, M. Brooke Rogers, Richard Amlôt, and G. James Rubin: “What Do We Mean by 'Community Resilience'? A Systematic Literature Review of How It Is Defined in the Literature” (2017)
Rebecca Solnit: “Paradise Built in Hell (THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMUNITIES THAT ARISE IN DISASTER)” (2010)
Tracy Gordon: “State Budgets in Recession” (2011)
Trust
Salma M Abdalla and colleagues: “Investing in trust and community resilience: lessons from the early months of the first digital pandemic” (2021)
Qing Han, Bang Zheng, Mioara Cristea, Maximilian Agostini, Jocelyn J. Bélanger, Ben Gützkow, Jannis Kreienkamp, N. Pontus Leander and PsyCorona Collaboration: “Trust in government regarding COVID-19 and its associations with preventive health behaviour and prosocial behaviour during the pandemic: a cross-sectional and longitudinal study” (2021)
Societal Collapse
Kathleen Florita: “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond” (2009)
Emilio Garcia, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale: “What Can We Learn from the Collapse of Societies in the Past?” (2021)
Danilo Brozović: “Societal collapse: A literature review” (2023)
Jem Bendell: “Breaking Together, A Freedom Loving Response to Collapse” (2023)
Jem Bendell: “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” (2020)
Historical Crisis Response
Ben Dodds and Richard Britnell: “Agriculture and Rural Society After the Black Death: Common Themes and Regional Variations” (2023)
Stuart J. Borsch: “The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study” (2005)
Jim Edwards: “500 years ago, China destroyed its world-dominating navy because its political elite was afraid of free trade” (2017)
Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado: “Natural Disasters: How many people die from disasters, and how are these impacts changing over time?”
