The Architecture of Civilization
Civilization as a race between two capacities usually treated as one: the capacity to produce complexity, and the capacity to manage its consequences. It lasts only while the second keeps pace with the first.
Research area
Infrastructure
8 reports in the series.
The Cascading Risk Atlas
Nodes, channels, amplifiers and circuit-breakers, with the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis as a live case.
From the West to the World
Debate about technology and development is usually conducted in the future tense. This report looks at what has already happened — which innovations reached the rest of the world, how completely, and what the record teaches about how diffusion works.
Polycrisis Resilience in an Era of Cascading Shocks
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.
Reducing Human Exposure to Cascading Risks in an Age of Polycrisis
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.
Building Adaptive Capacity Across the Emerging World Before 2050
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.
Clean Development as a Strategy for Global Risk Reduction
One asset class cuts seven coupled threats at once. The obstacle is not technology or cost but an appraisal system that credits a single benefit and prices none of the harm.
Building Resilient Development Pathways Through the Global Polycrisis
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.