An information navigator for the age of the polycrisis. Enter your location and know the risks across eight interconnected categories.
The 8 Categories of the Polycrisis
1. Complex Systems, Energy & Pollution
When one system fails, everything shakes.
The foundational environmental and systemic feedbacks driving the polycrisis: pollution, energy dynamics, and the interconnections that amplify climate change. Fossil fuels are the circulatory system of this machine: removing the fuel stops it, but keeping it kills the biosphere. And cleaning up sulphate pollution risks 'Termination Shock': losing the aerosol umbrella that reflects heat back into space. The transition introduces its own dependencies: critical minerals, lithium, cobalt, rare earths, whose supply chains are geopolitically concentrated and whose extraction carries its own ecological cost. Circular economy infrastructure is nowhere near adequate for the scale of change required.
2. Technological Developments & Threats
The tools of the future: ungoverned, concentrated, and increasingly weaponised.
AI, biotech, cyber capabilities, autonomous weapons, and digital surveillance are reshaping power, destabilising democracies, and creating risks that outpace the governance designed to manage them. The same tools enabling scientific breakthroughs lower the barrier to engineered pathogens, AI-generated disinformation at scale, and autonomous warfare. These are not hypothetical. They are already deployed.
3. Economics & Overshoot
We are living on ecological credit.
The economic system is structurally coupled to ecological overshoot, burning through the Earth's annual budget in July, loading debt onto future generations, and concentrating wealth at the top while the costs of extraction and pollution are borne by those with the least. Insurance markets are quietly pricing in the true cost of climate chaos. Governments are trapped by fossil-fuel revenues they cannot afford to lose, and we are trapped by fossil fuels, which infiltrate every aspect of our lives. Without fossil fuels, under the current system, billions of lives will immediately be at risk, however billions of lives are at risk if we continue. The paradox of our time.
4. Governance & Populism
The institutions built to protect us, hollowed from within.
Democratic backsliding, authoritarian governance, the fiscal fossil trap that locks governments into fossil-fuel dependency, media capture by politically aligned owners, and the weaponisation of information platforms are all undermining the institutions and trust needed to respond to the polycrisis. Governments cannot regulate the industry that funds them. The result is a political system architecturally incapable of the response the crisis demands.
5. Ecological Collapse
The web of life, unravelling faster than science predicted.
Seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been breached. The sixth mass extinction is underway. The WWF Living Planet Report 2024 found monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. Insect populations are collapsing. Sixty years of topsoil remain at current depletion rates. Coral reefs have crossed their tipping point. We are at 62% of safe global forest cover. Novel entities, the synthetic chemicals, PFAS, microplastics, and endocrine disruptors now saturating every ecosystem, are among the seven breached boundaries, an invisible contamination with no safe threshold yet defined. This is not a future threat, it is the present condition of the biosphere.
6. Public Health & Pandemics
Where planetary breakdown lands in the human body.
The health of people and planet are inseparable. Ecological destruction is driving zoonotic diseases such as malaria and dengue into new territories, where human populations have never encountered these threats before. Synthetic chemicals, including PFAS, are now detectable in virtually every human blood sample on Earth, disrupting hormones, impairing fertility, and accumulating through the food chain. Extreme heat is approaching the limits of human physiology. Antimicrobial resistance is quietly ending the era of antibiotics. Mental health infrastructure, already under-resourced, is being overwhelmed by eco-anxiety, pandemic aftermath, and economic stress. Healthcare systems, strained by workforce burnout and aging populations, are approaching the edge of what they can absorb.
7. Societal Impacts & Collapse
The crisis inside the crisis.
The polycrisis is producing a secondary crisis in the social fabric: loneliness, polarisation, loss of meaning and dignity, erosion of practical skills, and a generational divide between those who caused the crisis and those who will live inside it. Climate displacement is its most acute expression: 26 million people were displaced by weather disasters in 2023 alone, with hundreds of millions projected by 2050, and no international legal framework exists to receive them. The greatest long-term risk is the loss of the human capacity to respond: fragmented, traumatised, and disconnected communities cannot build the coordinated resilience the crisis demands.
8. Geopolitics & War
Resource wars, forever wars, and the limits of the possible.
War does not stay in the geopolitics category. It moves through energy, food, fertiliser, pollution, information, trust, prices, and daily life. Nuclear arsenals are expanding again as arms control treaties expire without replacement. Polycrises in the past have led to world wars. The difference now is scale and coupling: we are more interconnected than any civilisation in history. That interconnection is both our greatest fragility and our only path to coordinated resilience.