Recent global crises reveal an emerging pattern of causation that could increasingly characterize the birth and progress of future global crises. A conceptual framework identifies this pattern’s deep causes, intermediate processes, and ultimate outcomes. The framework shows how multiple stresses can interact within a single social-ecological system to cause a shift in that system’s behavior, how simultaneous shifts of this kind in several largely discrete social-ecological systems can interact to cause a far larger intersystemic crisis, and how such a larger crisis can then rapidly propagate across multiple system boundaries to the global scale. Case studies of the 2008-2009 financial-energy and food-energy crises illustrate the framework. Suggestions are offered for future research to explore further the framework’s propositions.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas ; Walker, Brian ; Biggs, Reinette ; Crépin, Anne-Sophie ; Folke, Carl ; et. al. Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis. In: Ecology and Society : a journal of integrative science for resilience and sustainability, Vol. 20, no.3, p. 6 (2015)
