Beyond Iran: How to navigate a world where crises collide

The war on Iran and its far-stretching consequences are only the latest in a series of global crises.

Climate change, economic and technological disruption, and geopolitical turmoil — such global crises are increasingly arriving together, interacting in ways that make them harder to predict and manage.

This is not just a period of bad luck. When pressures in climate, ecosystems, economies and governance interact, they can reinforce each other—creating a situation often described as a global polycrisis.

New research published in the journal Global Sustainability has looked deeper into polycrises and how societies can navigate out of them.

“What our research shows is that we need to reshape societies, but we need to at the same time keep them stable while we do so,” explains Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, lead author of the new study.

Living with structural turbulence

Modern societies are preconditioned to end up in polycrises, according to the researchers.

Global systems—such as energy, food, finance and information—have become highly complex and tightly connected. While this brings many benefits, it also creates patterns that are difficult to change. Dependencies form, feedbacks reinforce them, and over time societies can become locked into pathways that generate risk.

These polycrisis dynamics mean that instability is not temporary. It is, to a large extent, structural.

Adapting and changing—at the same time

The study examined a set of 23 well-established strategies drawn from the resilience literature. These so-called resilience capacities are divided into adaptative and transformative strategies.

Adaptation is about responding to change— keeping pace, adjusting to shocks, reducing harm, and keeping essential systems functioning.

Transformation is about changing direction—shifting the structures and patterns that generate risk in the first place.

Both are essential. But neither works on its own, the researchers argue.

Focusing only on adaptation can mean becoming better at adjusting to crises without addressing their causes. Focusing only on transformation can create disruption and resistance, especially when systems are already under stress.

“The challenge is to do both at once: to reshape systems under pressure while keeping them functioning,” explains Centre researcher Sofia Maniatakou.

Running to stay in place

But these resilience strategies are vulnerable too. At the same time as they can help us navigate polycrises, polycrises can undermine them, argue the researchers.

Misinformation can erode trust. Fragmentation can weaken coordination. Entrenched dependencies can reinforce existing pathways.

“As societies build the capacities needed to respond and transform, the underlying dynamics of the polycrisis can shift at the same time,” says Centre researcher Louis Delannoy.

This means that progress is not simply a matter of moving forward. In many cases, societies must continue adapting just to maintain their ability to act at all.

The result is a moving target: strategies and the conditions they are meant to address change together, sometimes in ways that limit effectiveness or redirect outcomes. In some cases, efforts to build capacity can unintentionally reinforce the very problems they are meant to address. In others, the dynamics themselves can erode the capacities needed to respond.

Taken together, this points to an open question. The identified strategies are clearly important—and in many cases essential. But whether they are sufficient, particularly for navigating complex and rapidly evolving technological systems, remains uncertain, according to the study.

Navigating, not solving

Rather than identifying a single solution, the research results map how different capacities interact with different kinds of challenges—highlighting both strengths and gaps.

“In a world shaped by interacting crises and structural instability, the task is not to solve one problem at a time. It is to build the ability to navigate ongoing change—to respond, to adjust, and to transform,” concludes Peter Søgaard Jørgensen.

Doing so requires holding two things together: the capacity to keep pace with disruption, and the capacity to change direction.

In a turbulent world, that balance may be the most important capacity of all.