TLDR: Meta-crisis: the mechanisms that should solve problems are themselves deteriorating.
My Society for Risk Analysis Conference Presentation
At the Australia New Zealand Society for Risk Analysis Conference in Christchurch on 29-30 Jan 2026 it was clear that systemic risk and polycrisis concepts are moving from the margins to the centre of risk analysis.
In my own presentation I uniquely connected these dynamics to cultural evolution and the degradation of societal evolvability (ie our ability to produce complex adaptations to mitigate global risk).
Stream the audio of my presentation (15 min)
Download my slides (pptx)
Global risk mitigation is like the parable of the blind monks and the elephant: each of at least six disciplines grasps a real part of the problem, but none sees or acts on the whole.
Current disaster risk reduction reveals we are systematically underprepared for rare-but-catastrophic events; global catastrophic risk research shows that some of these threats could overwhelm civilisation entirely. Yet national risk assessments indicate that governments mostly plan as if risks were local, isolated, and manageable, when in reality they are not.
Systemic risk and polycrisis research deepens the picture by showing that the world is not just facing many dangers, but rising, interacting stresses that can cascade across tightly coupled global systems. This means today’s risk landscape is not simply a series of external shocks, but a living, unstable system generating hazards from within itself.
But these frameworks still leave a crucial question unanswered: why do humans keep building such a fragile world?
In my talk I noted that the answer requires turning to human behaviour and cultural evolution. Human actions are shaped by biases, incentives, institutions, and evolved social dynamics that develop in response to built and inherited human environments.
These processes give rise to many strategies that are locally successful but globally disastrous. Over time, these dynamics can create maladaptive “trap states”, even worse, they can erode society’s very capacity to adapt.
Evolvability is the key
I contested that the notion of ‘evolvability’ becomes central. For societies to cope with an unpredictable future, humanity must avoid entrenchments and path-dependent maladaptation. There is need for the right kinds of variation, modularity, institutional and informational stability, and effective constraints on harmful “outlaw” strategies, or complex adaptations to mitigate risk cannot emerge. Yet arguably all of these are currently degrading on the global stage.
As a result, humanity is not just producing risks faster than it can manage them; it is undermining the mechanisms that would allow us to learn, adapt, and recover.
The meta-crisis
Formally, this is a meta-crisis. We are not only in a polycrisis where multiple risks are interacting resulting in threats greater than the sum of their parts, we are losing the capacity to evolve our way out of it, which means the core task is not merely risk reduction, but preservation of, and working with, the ingredients of human system evolvability itself.
Addressing global risk requires understanding and acting across all six of these (and other) fields together. This is likely to require integrative governance across risk disciplines and jurisdictions (a story for another day).
Systemic risk and polycrisis: the emerging norm of risk science
At the SRA conference, I was certainly not alone in diagnosing systemic risk as a critical theme in present-day risk analysis, and this was illustrated across many sessions, by a range of contributors.
Taken collectively, the Christchurch SRA conference suggests a clear shift in risk science away from isolated-hazard, probability–impact framing toward a more systemic conception of risk. Across keynotes, methodological talks, and applied case studies, speakers repeatedly foregrounded interdependence, cascades, emergence, polycrisis-like dynamics, and value pluralism.
Systemic risk thinking is no longer confined to niche complexity scholarship but is increasingly shaping both academic risk analysis and practical decision-making frameworks.
I suggest that even with this convergence on the nuance and interdependent complexity of risk, we will never escape a cascade of escalating global risk until we find ways to address the behavioural and evolutionary generative mechanisms of the situation the world is presently in.
We should build societies that are safe and resilient because they can evolve well, not because they try to predict everything or stay the same.
A focus on engineering and nudging ‘evolvability’ provides the potential for a broad-based structural solution to global risk. I’m planning deeper work on this issue…
Adapt Research Ltd 