4 November 2015, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Tipping points: A new landscape of global crises. Recent crises are increasingly global and follow new kinds of patterns in the past crises were often local and isolated. They left surrounding ecosystems and societies largely unaffected. This made aid and governance work easier.Today, crises are becoming more global in reach affecting more people and systems at the same time. In a recent study lead by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Brian Walker published in Ecology and Society with Centre researchers Oonsie Biggs, Anne-Sophie Crépin, Carl Folke, Garry Peterson, Johan Rockström, Will Steffen and Max Troell a framework to identify the causes, processes and outcomes of multiple interconnected crises which they term “synchronous failure” is proposed. A guide for understanding globally interconnected crises The framework shows how several stressors together can cause a crisis which can rapidly spread to become global in reach. “We have developed a framework for understanding how global crises may emerge,” says Biggs. “Our framework could be used as an initial guide for systematic analyses and identifying early-warning signals and measures for building social-ecological resilience. It can also support establishment of appropriate governance structures that can navigate the danger of synchronous failure,” she says. Causes of crises The authors argue that future crises will increasingly result from three long-term global trends: the dramatic increase in human economic activity in relation to Earth’s environment, the rapidly increasing connections across the globe, and the decreasing diversity of human cultures, institutions, practices and technologies. These three trends create several stresses and reduce the capacity of systems to deal with disturbances. Case studies from the 2008 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate this. In the food-energy crises four stresses seemed to have affected the systems simultaneously, sometimes enhancing the impacts on one another:
1. diminishing supply of new agricultural land of good quality
2. declining returns on intensifying agriculture through more extensive inputs
3. climate change related extreme weather such as droughts
4. consistent high demand for food in a world with a growing population. Read More here