The Spectrum of (Poly)Crisis: Exploring polycrises of the past to better understand our current and future risks

As the concept of polycrisis gains popularity among academics, policy-makers, and the general public, many questions linger about the utility, scope, and applicability of the term in different contexts. Building on prior work, we argue that crises can fruitfully be understood as existing along a spectrum, characterized by multiple different factors, with our modern polycrisis at one extreme. We illustrate this by surveying three historical periods with varying geographical scope – late 1st-millennium CE Mesoamerica, Late Medieval Eurasia, and the early modern Northern Hemisphere – arguing that these exhibited many, but not all, of the key characteristics that make up a polycrisis. We detail the experience of individual societies during these periods, focused on regions to highlight how stresses and dysfunction across multiple systems combined to produce devastating impacts and contrast these with the relatively mild experiences of others facing the same conditions. We highlight how the interaction of stresses across ecological, economic, social, and political systems produced disasters that further deepened these crises and so led to yet more disasters and further devastation. We illustrate how viewing these historical periods through a polycrisis lens can not only inform our understanding of the past but can produce valuable lessons for our modern world. The multi-faceted, far-reaching, and devastating consequences of our current polycrisis should not be viewed as entirely a recent phenomenon. Ultimately, we argue that studying historical polycrises as we do here can help us learn lessons from the past that allow us to hone strategies for addressing the comparable issues we face today and will continue to contend with for the foreseeable future.