Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis

By T. Homer-Dixon, B. Walker, Reinette Biggs, A. Crépin, Carl Folke, Eric F. Lambin, Garry D. Peterson, J. Rockström, Marten Scheffer, Will Steffen and 1 more. 2015

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/216323d762627ae2f183622757b10ce3e9d8b15f

Citations in the corpus

• Complexity and the Economics of Climate Change: A Survey and a Look Forward (2017, unknown): “Given the empirically well-documented degree of interdependences between actors in the financial, production and energy sides of the economy (Buldyrev et al., 2010; Beale et al., 2011; Battiston et al., 2012a; Homer-Dixon et al., 2015), the role of such relationships with respect to climate policy a”