Polycrisis Resilience: A Research Report

Abstract

Polycrisis Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, societies, economies, institutions, and interconnected systems to withstand, adapt to, recover from, and reduce vulnerability to multiple interacting and compounding crises. Developed as a framework for understanding resilience in an era of interconnected global risks, the concept shifts attention from recovery alone toward reducing the underlying vulnerabilities that make crises so damaging. The report argues that resilience is best understood as the ability to maintain essential functions, manage systemic disruptions, adapt to changing conditions, and strengthen long-term stability across multiple scales and hazard types.

Drawing on evidence from recent crises, including Winter Storm Uri in Texas, the global food and energy price shock of 2021-2023, the Pakistan floods, the Sri Lankan economic crisis, and the CrowdStrike outage, the report identifies recurring patterns that amplify systemic failures. These include depleted buffers, single points of failure, gradual erosion followed by sudden shocks, and policy responses that unintentionally worsen crises. The findings suggest that outcomes are often determined less by the severity of the shock itself than by the condition of systems before the crisis occurs, particularly the availability of reserves, redundancy, institutional capacity, and adaptive capabilities.

The report proposes a practical framework built around eight essential functions, six scales of resilience, four resilience capacities, and seven core objectives. These objectives include reducing vulnerability, strengthening development, accelerating technological diffusion, advancing the clean transition, promoting convergence, improving adaptive capacity, and strengthening long-term stability. Particular emphasis is placed on protecting critical dependencies such as energy and digital systems, building buffers before crises emerge, and pursuing investments that reduce vulnerability across multiple hazards simultaneously.

The central conclusion is that resilience should not be viewed simply as the ability to bounce back from disruption. Rather, it is the process of reducing the vulnerabilities that make crises so destructive in the first place. In a world increasingly characterized by cascading and interconnected risks, long-term resilience depends on strengthening the economic, technological, institutional, infrastructural, environmental, and human foundations that enable societies to withstand and adapt to future shocks.

Key findings

1. Crises now arrive together. Between 2020 and 2024 a pandemic, a Texas power failure, a canal blockage, a war, a global price shock, sovereign defaults, record floods and a software failure followed one another. Food prices peaked 67% above 2019 and European gas at 15.7 times.
2. The decisive variable is vulnerability, not only the hazard. The world death rate from disasters is about 96% lower than in 1900 to 1949 although recorded disasters have multiplied several times since 1970. What changed is the capacity of societies to absorb hazards.
3. Eight essential functions carry the rest. Energy and digital systems are the keystone dependencies: six of the other seven functions depend heavily on energy, and the digital layer is the second most depended-on. Food and health are the most exposed downstream.
4. Resilience has six scales and four recurring failure patterns. Gains at one scale can shift risk to another, as when export bans protected domestic markets and hurt importers. The patterns are depleted buffers, single points of failure, slow erosion followed by sudden shock, and responses that compound the crisis.
5. Buffers separated the countries that bent from those that broke. In 2022 Sri Lanka's reserves covered 1.1 months of imports and Pakistan's 1.4, against 7.0 for India. Sri Lanka's inflation averaged 49.7% and it defaulted. India's was 6.7%.
6. Prevention is under-financed relative to its returns. Estimates put returns to resilience investment between 2:1 and 10:1, yet developing-country adaptation finance was $26 billion in 2023 against an estimated need of $310 to 365 billion a year by 2035.

Contents

1. About This Reportp. 3
2. Executive SummaryThe concept in one paragraph and principal findingsp. 4
3. 1A World of Interacting Crisesp. 5
4. 2Defining Polycrisis Resiliencep. 8
5. 3From Recovery to Vulnerability Reductionp. 11
6. 4Essential Functions: What Must Keep Workingp. 15
7. 5Six Scales of Resiliencep. 18
8. 6How Crises Compound: Four Failure Patternsp. 20
9. 7Five Cascades Examinedp. 21
10. 8What the Cases Teachp. 25
11. 9The Seven Core Objectives in Practicep. 26
12. 10The Economics of Preventionp. 28
13. 11Measuring Polycrisis Resiliencep. 30
14. 12Trade-offs, Critiques and Limitsp. 32
15. 13Strategic Priorities, Research Agenda and Conclusionp. 33
16. Appendix: Data, Methods and Exhibitsp. 35
17. Glossaryp. 36
18. Referencesp. 37

Section links open the PDF at the corresponding page in a new tab.

Glossary

Adaptive capacity

The ability of people, institutions and systems to adjust to changing conditions, take advantage of opportunities and cope with consequences.

Buffer

A reserve, stock, margin or spare capacity that lets a system absorb a shock without failing, such as foreign-exchange reserves, fiscal space or backup power.

Cascade

The propagation of failure or stress from one system to others through dependencies.

Common driver

A single stress that affects several systems at the same time (Lawrence et al., 2024).

Compound event

A combination of drivers or hazards that together produce a larger impact than any would alone (Zscheischler et al., 2018).

Essential function

A service that society cannot do without during a crisis. This report names eight: energy, water, food, health, finance, digital systems, transport and trade, and governance.

Exposure

The presence of people, assets and systems in places where they could be adversely affected by a hazard.

Graceful degradation

A controlled reduction of service in which less essential demands are shed so that essential ones survive.

Hazard

A potentially damaging physical event, trend or disturbance, such as a flood, heat wave or outage.

Keystone function

An essential function on which many others depend, so that its failure has outsized effects. In this report, energy and digital systems.

Maladaptation

Action intended to reduce vulnerability that increases it elsewhere or later.

Minimum service level

The least delivery of an essential function that must be maintained through a crisis.

Polycrisis

A condition in which crises in multiple systems become causally entangled in ways that worsen overall prospects.

Polycrisis Resilience

The capacity of individuals, communities, societies, economies, institutions and interconnected systems to withstand, adapt to, recover from and reduce vulnerability to multiple interacting and compounding crises (H Heuristics).

Single point of failure

A component, supplier, route or technology whose failure disables the function that depends on it.

Systemic risk

The risk that failure in one part of a connected system spreads to cause widespread failure.

Vulnerability

The propensity to be adversely affected, shaped by susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt.

Weakest-link aggregation

A way of combining scores that penalizes low values, such as a geometric mean or a minimum.

How to cite

@techreport{hughes2026polycrisis,
  title = {Polycrisis Resilience: A Research Report},
  author = {Hughes, Hunter},
  institution = {H Heuristics},
  type = {Research Report},
  series = {H Heuristics Polycrisis Resilience Series},
  number = {6},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  doi = {10.6084/m9.figshare.34937230},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.34937230},
  copyright = {CC BY 4.0},
  keywords = {polycrisis resilience, vulnerability reduction, systemic risk, cascading failures, compound crises, essential functions, critical infrastructure, buffers, adaptive capacity, Winter Storm Uri, Sri Lanka economic crisis, Pakistan floods, CrowdStrike outage}
}

Download citation: BibTeX (.bib) · RIS (.ris) · https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.34937230

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