The Age of Intersecting Crises?

Dec 5, 2022 | Tobias Ide
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While climate change is arguably the most important challenge of our time, headlines were frequently dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and more recently skyrocketing energy and food prices.

However, the crises we are seeing today are often not just happening coincidentally around the same time. Instead, they are frequently very deeply interrelated, reinforcing and driving each other. Climate change and the destruction of ecosystems, for instance, bring humans and wild animals in closer contact with each other, thereby increasing the risk of viruses transitioning from animals to humans (like COVID-19 did).

Second, researchers have pointed out a number of strategies that exploit the interdependencies between major challenges to address them in an integrated manner. Proponents of environmental peacebuilding, for instance, argue that shared environmental problems provide entry points for parties in conflict to initiate positive-sum cooperation, hence addressing environmental degradation and threats to peace simultaneously.