Research area
26 reports in the series.
Development as a resilience strategy, tested on 194 countries: development capability tracks sharply lower child mortality, poverty and disaster deaths, and deficit stacks have shrunk from 3.8 to 1.2 billion people. But development does not buy stability, and it raises emissions.
Existing resilience, risk-reduction and adaptation work is organised hazard by hazard, while the risk arrives through the connections. A proposed framework defines the capacity to respond to the interactions themselves, and a six-question test to screen any action against it.
Heat, polluted air and disaster cost children learning in the classroom, but the decisive harm happens at home, when a shock forces a poor household to pull a child out of school. A cohort model shows where the trap tightens and how to break it.
The flagship statement of the Polycrisis Apocalypse thesis: ten coupled pressures, ranked by how many people they reach, and nine original calculations showing when thin buffers turn separate shocks into compounding, persistent harm.
Venus, Earth and Mars began with the same ingredients. Only Earth kept liquid water for four billion years. Habitability as an emergent property of coupled systems — maintained, not given.
Where Survivability Risk Regions are, who will live in them as the demographic centre shifts, and what an exposure integral over 48,000 years implies. Third in the Polycrisis Apocalypse line, after HH-2026-24 and HH-2026-33.
A second, Global Risk & Earth Systems edition of the Polycrisis Apocalypse framework — reframed around the gap between survival and sustainable survival, and followed through centuries, millennia and deep time. Supersedes HH-2026-24.
How the demographic centre of humanity is moving into the planet’s most climate-exposed regions, and what it will take to keep the late twenty-first century liveable. Part II of the Century Recalibration series.
Where is humanity headed by 2100? The demographic shift toward Africa and South Asia, the ageing of the West and East Asia, the convergence of the Asian century, and the polycrisis — and what life will be like for the median human at the end of the century.
The case for accelerating development is usually moral and economic. This report adds a third argument — timing: several slow stresses are set to peak together between 2040 and 2060, and development cuts vulnerability far faster than mitigation cuts hazard.
How air pollution, heat, hunger and poverty harm the body and mind, how feedback loops make the suffering self-reinforcing, and why it will be prolonged for centuries in the regions where survival is most at risk.
How many people the entangled crises of the century could kill, who is most exposed and vulnerable, and how much of the toll is avoidable: measured evidence, a transparent scenario model and an honest account of the catastrophic tail.
Resilience finance is scarce and barely correlated with vulnerability. Scoring 122 economies on risk intensity, risk mass and deliverability to show where each dollar would do the most.
How climate change, pollution, and ecosystem degradation compound each other — and where three pillars of resilience should intervene.
What protects health, security, connection and hope when climate, economic, conflict, health and information risks arrive together — the evidence, the four layers of protection, and a ten-year path.
Why the investments that lift people up are the same investments that stop shocks from spreading.
Climate, pollution and instability act on the same people at the same time. A five-layer Capacity Stack for anticipating, absorbing and adapting to all three at once — and why capacity built early is cheaper than capacity improvised.
Why risks now travel together, how shocks cascade through coupled systems, and what governments, firms and communities can do to keep functioning — the evidence, a framework and a roadmap.
How shrinking the number of people in harm’s way, loosening the links between failing systems, and enlarging financial and institutional buffers can reduce the human cost of coupled global crises.
Demography, Asia and Africa’s rise, technology and AI, climate, pollution and biodiversity, geopolitics, and whether progress can outpace systemic risk: a forward analysis to 2100.
Which places are most likely to keep sustaining human health, stability and prosperity as climate, resource, demographic and governance stresses arrive together? A Habitability Resilience Index for 175 countries — and a demographic mismatch at its centre.
Why 2027 is the year the slow variables and the fast shocks arrive together, and what that means for those who must prepare.
A transparent 0–100 index of national capacity to reduce, absorb and adapt to compound risk — 40 countries, 18 indicators, six pillars, projected to 2100 under four IPCC pathways.
How much of humanity will live for decades with a shrinking margin for error, and where? A Survivability Exposure Index across seven world regions, set against each region’s adaptive capacity.
Adaptive capacity is the meta-capability that decides whether a shock becomes a contained disruption or a cascading crisis. It runs on two engines — infrastructure and institutions — that must be built together.
Systemic vulnerability is built, not given. Two levers — adaptation and clean infrastructure — can lower it, but only if they are financed and sequenced before the concrete is poured.