Global Affairs & Policy
There is a thought experiment that used to serve as a useful warning for policymakers and was more recently elevated to a near-universal truth: imagine a single match dropped in a dry field on the other side of the world. How long before the smoke reaches you? In 2019, the answer was weeks — when a novel coronavirus began spreading through a city most people had never visited, in a province many could not locate on a map. Within four months, global GDP had contracted by an estimated 3.5 percent, the steepest since World War Two. Within a year, more than 100 million people had been pushed back below the poverty line. The match had been dropped. The smoke was everywhere.
That is the world we now inhabit permanently. Not a world where crises occasionally spill across borders, but one in which crises are borderless by design — moving through the arteries of trade, finance, migration, digital networks, and atmosphere with a speed and intimacy that the international order was never built to manage. Economists have begun calling it a "polycrisis," a term first popularised by the historian Adam Tooze: not simply multiple crises occurring at once, but crises that interact and amplify each other, turning what might have been a manageable regional problem into something that reshapes the entire global system. We are, as researchers at the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Initiative have put it plainly, "facing interconnected crises that demand coordinated, collective action." What the world lacks — urgently, dangerously — is a system of cooperation sophisticated enough to match the complexity of the problems it faces.
To understand why the old playbook of national-first crisis management is now inadequate, it helps to trace the specific pathways by which crises travel. Take the most direct example: a pandemic. The COVID-19 virus did not respect the International Health Regulations that were supposed to trigger early notification and coordinated response. By the time Chinese authorities formally notified the World Health Organization in December 2019, millions had traveled to and from Wuhan during the weeks of undetected community spread, seeding infections across every continent. The Lancet COVID-19 Commission ultimately concluded that the crisis was "a massive global failure of policy coordination and social solidarity." Countries that had invested in pandemic preparedness frameworks — South Korea, New Zealand, Finland — managed the early waves with relative discipline. Countries that had underfunded international health capacity or retreated from multilateral obligations faced devastating consequences. The lesson, seemingly obvious in retrospect, was that no country can build a firewall high enough to stop a pathogen. Health security, as one group of researchers concluded, is "a collective endeavour."
But the pandemic also demonstrated something less frequently discussed: how a health crisis rapidly becomes an economic crisis, which becomes a food crisis, which becomes a political crisis, which becomes a migration crisis. The sequence is not theoretical. It happened. Global supply chains, already under strain, fractured. Food prices spiked. Governments across the developing world, already stretched thin, spent emergency fiscal reserves they could not replenish. And then inflation arrived, driven by pandemic-era monetary policy and supply-side shocks, and the debt trap snapped shut. By 2024, global public debt had reached a record $102 trillion. The consequences were not distributed evenly across that figure. Developing countries, which account for less than a third of global public debt by value, bore the sharpest costs. A staggering 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on servicing debt interest than on either health or education. Every dollar flowing to a creditor in London or New York is a dollar not flowing to a clinic in Nairobi or a classroom in Dhaka.
The numbers behind that debt spiral reveal how deeply the financial architecture itself has become a mechanism of interconnected crisis. Since 2020, developing regions have been borrowing at rates two to four times higher than the United States, even when the underlying projects are comparable in quality and risk. In 2024, developing nations paid $921 billion in net interest on public debt — up ten percent from the year before. The World Bank's International Debt Report, released in late 2025, found that developing countries paid out $741 billion more in principal and interest than they received in new financing between 2022 and 2024 — the largest gap in at least fifty years. As of early 2026, 75 out of 119 low- and middle-income countries with available credit assessments are in or at risk of debt distress. These are not abstract statistics. They describe the lived fiscal reality of governments that must choose daily between repaying bondholders and paying nurses, between meeting IMF conditions and keeping schools open.
If the debt spiral is the slow bleed, climate change is the accelerant. What makes climate a uniquely dangerous component of the polycrisis is not simply its scale — though the scale is extraordinary — but its function as a force multiplier for every other crisis that exists. It does not create problems in isolation. It takes problems that are already difficult and makes them catastrophic. The drought that was a bad harvest becomes a famine. The flood that was a disruption becomes a displacement. The heatwave that was an inconvenience for wealthy, air-conditioned populations becomes a death sentence for agricultural labourers in West Africa or South Asia who work outdoors in temperatures that now regularly exceed safe physiological limits. In 2024 alone, total economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $320 billion globally — nearly 40 percent higher than the decade-long annual average, with the World Meteorological Organization confirming that year as the hottest ever recorded.
The trajectory is not reassuring. A 2024 study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact estimated that by 2050, damages to agriculture, infrastructure, health and productivity could cost the world economy $38 trillion a year. The International Chamber of Commerce calculated that extreme weather events cost the global economy approximately $2 trillion across nearly 4,000 events in just the last decade — and that figure, researchers noted, was an underestimate, because most uninsured losses in the developing world never make it into the accounting. The adaptation financing gap — the difference between what vulnerable nations need to protect themselves from climate impacts and what wealthy nations have committed to provide — remains one of the most glaring failures of the international system. Every dollar invested in adaptation today, research consistently shows, saves four in avoided losses tomorrow. Yet the money still does not flow, and the loss and damage fund established at COP28 has so far received contributions that amount to a rounding error against the actual need.
Why the South Bears What the North Created: The cruel arithmetic of climate injustice is that the countries least responsible for cumulative greenhouse gas emissions are the most exposed to climate consequences. Sub-Saharan Africa contributes approximately three percent of global emissions yet faces disproportionate crop failure, water stress, and extreme weather. Small island developing states, responsible for a fraction of a percent of global emissions, face the elimination of their territorial existence through sea-level rise. The moral and political weight of this asymmetry — that the people who did the least to cause the problem suffer the most from it — sits at the heart of every failed international negotiation and every fractured climate summit.
What makes the climate-crisis nexus particularly alarming is that it does not stop at economics. At the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide — equivalent to one in every 67 people on Earth — with displacement having nearly doubled over the last decade. Conflict is the primary driver of that number, but climate and conflict are increasingly inseparable. Research on the Sahel, Syria, Somalia, and parts of Central America consistently identifies climate-driven resource scarcity — shrinking water tables, collapsing harvests, competition for arable land — as a structural precondition for violent conflict. Climate displacement is simultaneously a climate justice issue, a humanitarian crisis, a security threat, and a political flashpoint in every destination country where displaced people arrive. It is, in other words, a single phenomenon that fractures into crises across every domain of governance simultaneously.
The most disorienting feature of the current moment is that these interconnected crises are arriving just as the international political architecture that might address them is fracturing. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025, drawing on insights from over 900 experts worldwide, found that nearly two-thirds of respondents anticipate a turbulent or stormy global landscape by 2035, with 64 percent expecting a fragmented global order marked by competition among middle and great powers. Misinformation and disinformation ranked first among short-term global risks — not because fake news is more dangerous than pandemics or nuclear weapons, but because it systematically corrodes the social trust and epistemic common ground that international cooperation requires. You cannot build a global consensus on climate action when a significant portion of the electorate in major emitting nations has been persuaded that the scientific consensus does not exist. You cannot coordinate a pandemic response when vaccine hesitancy, amplified by algorithmic recommendation engines and state-sponsored influence operations, turns a public health intervention into a culture war.
Societal polarisation and economic downturn are now identified as the most interconnected and therefore most influential risks in the global risk network — drivers and potential consequences of dozens of other risks simultaneously. The logic is straightforward but deeply troubling: economic hardship fuels grievance; grievance fuels polarisation; polarisation fuels distrust of institutions; distrust of institutions undermines the democratic legitimacy of multilateral commitments; undermined multilateral commitments make collective crisis response impossible. The chain runs in one direction as things deteriorate, and it is very difficult to reverse. There is a reason why the international governance architecture built in the post-World War Two era — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Health Organization — is under greater stress today than at almost any point since its founding. It was designed for a world of discrete national crises and bilateral or bloc-level diplomacy. It was not designed for a world in which a bat coronavirus, a Russian invasion, a decade of drought, and a social media disinformation campaign can combine into a single cascading catastrophe with no obvious responsible party and no clear jurisdictional authority to respond.
The geopolitical dimension makes this harder still. Any disruption in the trade relationship between the United States and China affects every supply chain on earth, including those that carry medical equipment, microchips, and food. The Russia-Ukraine conflict raised global wheat and fertiliser prices, triggering food insecurity from Egypt to Sri Lanka — neither of which had any role in the conflict. Trade wars that begin as domestic political theatre metastasise into genuine developmental crises in countries that depend on export earnings to service debt and fund public services. The interconnections run in every direction, and they do not wait for diplomatic calendars or electoral cycles. Meanwhile, international organisations tasked with peacekeeping and conflict resolution have found their authority challenged from multiple directions: by great powers unwilling to accept constraints on their own behaviour, by middle powers seeking regional dominance, and by non-state actors — terrorist networks, criminal organisations, private military contractors — that operate entirely outside the framework of international law.
None of this is to say that cooperation is impossible — only that the cooperation now required is qualitatively different from anything the international community has previously attempted. The Paris Agreement on climate, the WHO's International Health Regulations, the Global Compact on Refugees, the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative — these are all genuine accomplishments, evidence that nations can agree on frameworks for collective action when the political will exists. But each of them has also revealed the gap between framework and implementation, between agreement and enforcement, between the commitments made in conference rooms and the resources actually deployed in crisis zones. The Lancet identified the WHO's pandemic framework as representing "a catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity." The climate finance pledges made at successive COPs have repeatedly failed to materialise in full. Official development assistance from DAC member countries fell 7.3 percent in 2024, to just 0.3 percent of donor countries' gross national income — less than half the internationally agreed target of 0.7 percent, at precisely the moment when the developing world's need for concessional financing is most acute.
The gap between what is pledged and what is delivered is not merely a technical failure. It reflects a structural feature of the international system: democratic governments face domestic political accountability for public spending but face no equivalent accountability for failing to honour international commitments. A finance minister who diverts funds from foreign aid to domestic infrastructure faces no international legal consequence. A health ministry that fails to build surveillance capacity for pandemic preparedness, thereby exposing its neighbours to undetected outbreaks, faces no sanction. The incentive structure runs directly against the cooperative behaviour that the global commons requires. This is not a new insight — it is the foundational problem of international relations — but its consequences have grown far more dangerous as the problems requiring cooperation have grown more urgent and more interconnected.
What genuine cooperation requires, at this moment, starts with an honest recalibration of the international financial architecture. UNCTAD has called explicitly for an effective debt workout mechanism, enhanced liquidity in crisis periods, and far more concessional finance for countries caught in the debt trap. The case is not sentimental. When governments must choose between debt service and education, they build fewer educated workforces, create less economic growth, generate less tax revenue, and become more, not less, dependent on external financing. The cycle is self-defeating for creditors as well as debtors. The reform of international financial institutions — restructuring the voting power that still reflects a post-war distribution of global economic weight rather than contemporary reality — is not charity. It is the prerequisite for building a global economy stable enough to sustain the cooperation everything else depends on.
On climate, the imperative is the same but the urgency is more visceral. Meaningful progress on the climate transition requires international cooperation, including adherence to the Paris Agreement frameworks, the actual delivery of committed climate finance, and the creation of technology transfer mechanisms that allow developing nations to leapfrog fossil fuel dependency rather than replicating the carbon-intensive industrialisation pathways of the 19th and 20th centuries. The growing tensions between major powers actively hinder this. When US-China competition makes climate cooperation a geopolitical liability, the atmosphere does not pause to observe the ceasefire. The science does not negotiate. 1.5 degrees Celsius is not a diplomatic position. It is a physical threshold with consequences that no wall, no trade bloc, no missile defence system can prevent from arriving.
Where Cooperation Is Working: Amid the failures, instructive examples persist. The COVAX initiative, despite its inequities, demonstrated that a multilateral vaccine distribution mechanism was technically feasible. The Haramain High-Speed Railway linking Saudi Arabia's holy cities shows how regional infrastructure investment can transform mobility and economic integration simultaneously. The African Continental Free Trade Area, if fully implemented, represents the largest free trade zone in the world by member countries — a demonstration that the Global South is building its own frameworks for integration rather than waiting for the North to reform. These are not solutions to the polycrisis, but they are proof that cooperative infrastructure, when built with genuine political will and adequate resourcing, can function.
On pandemic preparedness, the lesson of COVID-19 has been expensive enough that most governments at least understand what they failed to do. Preventing the next pandemic is akin to preventing the next recession — a statement that ought to be obvious but that has still not been fully translated into the sustained, funded, legally binding international architecture the threat demands. The WHO-led pandemic treaty process has been slow, contested, and inadequately resourced. But the alternative — returning to the pre-COVID system of voluntary guidelines and national sovereignty over disease disclosure — has already proven catastrophically insufficient. The next pathogen does not have to be SARS-CoV-2. It could be more transmissible, more lethal, or more resistant to the vaccine platforms that saved millions of lives in 2021. The question is not whether the world will face another pandemic — scientists are unanimous that it will — but whether the institutions and agreements and supply chains and equity frameworks will be in place when it arrives.
The World Economic Forum, assessing risks over a ten-year horizon, finds that environmental risks dominate: extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse. Nearly two-thirds of global risk experts anticipate a turbulent or stormy global landscape by 2035. Inequality and societal polarisation remain in the long-term top ten — an important pair precisely because of how they interact, how inequality feeds polarisation, how polarisation blocks the redistributive policies that might address inequality, how both together undermine the democratic legitimacy of international institutions. The feedback loops are not theoretical. They are playing out in real time, in the politics of dozens of nations, in the erosion of multilateral institutions, in the growing temptation of the strong to act unilaterally and leave the vulnerable to manage on their own.
The decade between now and 2035 is, in the assessment of almost every serious analyst of global risk, the period in which the trajectories of these interconnected crises will be set for a generation. The infrastructure investments made or not made in the next ten years will determine whether low-income countries can adapt to climate impacts or become permanently destabilised. The international health architecture built or neglected in this decade will determine whether the next pandemic kills millions or is contained. The debt reforms implemented or deferred will determine whether 3.4 billion people remain trapped in the fiscal spiral that prevents their governments from investing in human capital, or begin to build the economic foundations for genuine resilience. The institutional reforms advanced or abandoned will determine whether multilateralism is capable of governing a genuinely multipolar world, or whether it collapses into the kind of fragmented, competitive, nationalist disorder from which the post-war order was specifically designed to escape.
What is striking — and what should perhaps be the most powerful argument for urgency — is that the cooperative investments required are not, in most cases, extraordinarily costly by comparison with the damage they prevent. Every dollar invested in climate adaptation saves four in avoided losses. Adequate pandemic preparedness funding would cost a small fraction of what COVID-19 cost the global economy. Debt relief mechanisms that allow developing countries to invest in their own resilience generate growth that eventually benefits creditors as well as debtors. The case for cooperation is not one of sacrifice. It is one of compounding returns versus compounding catastrophe. The choice between them, however, requires something that markets and national politics systematically under-provide: the capacity to act on long time horizons, across borders, on behalf of people who are not yet born or who live on the other side of the world and do not vote in your election.
That is, in the end, the deepest challenge of the interconnected world. Not a technical challenge, though the technical challenges are immense. Not a financial challenge, though the financial architecture urgently needs reform. The deepest challenge is political and moral — the challenge of building institutions, norms, and incentive structures that make it possible for human beings, organised as we are into competing nations and factions and interest groups, to act collectively on behalf of the shared civilisation we all actually inhabit. John Donne wrote, four centuries ago, that no man is an island. He was speaking of mortality and community. He was, as it turns out, also speaking of geopolitics, epidemiology, climate physics, and the mathematics of sovereign debt. The world he described — in which every person is a piece of the continent, diminished by any loss — is the world we now have the science and the data to understand with extraordinary precision. Whether we have the wisdom and the will to act on that understanding is the question that the coming decade will answer, for better or worse, for all of us.
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