Both adaptive and transformative capacities are necessary to navigate global polycrisis

Efforts toward global sustainability transformations risks being undermined by the formation of a global polycrisis, where multiple global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical conflict, and pandemics interact to reinforce each other. Resilience scholarship has identified multiple capacities needed for adaptation and transformation of social-ecological systems. Here, we explore the leverage and vulnerability of such capacities to the global polycrisis. We find that many capacities have both and their development and expression can therefore be thought of as being in a direct coevolutionary struggle with the development of a global polycrisis.

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Keywords: Anthropocene traps, cultural evolution, evolvability, resilience, transformations

Citation: Søgaard Jørgensen, P., L. Delannoy, S. Maniatakou, C. Folke, M.-L. Moore, and P. Olsson. 2026. Both adaptive and transformative capacities are necessary to navigate global polycrisis. Global Sustainability 9(e16):1–9.

Both adaptive and transformative capacities are necessary to navigate global polycrisis

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