Resilience

№ 2026-86 · November 2026 · 22 min

Polycrisis Resilience: The H Heuristics Concept

Polycrisis Resilience, the H Heuristics concept, is the systematic development of five capacities to prevent, absorb, adapt to and recover from interconnected crises while reducing their cascading effects; across 145 countries the five capacities rise together (one component carries 81% of their variance; income explains 86% of the composite, 22nd percentile in low-income against 76th in high-income countries), they go with lower structural vulnerability but do not forecast any single shock's outcome, so the concept's claim is about cascades and long-term consequences.

№ 2026-84 · November 2026 · 27 min

The Economics of Resilience in an Age of Global Polycrisis

Volatility costs 0.04 points of growth a year while shortfalls of three points or more cost 0.9, shortfalls are largely permanent (permanent share 0.72–1.06, labour productivity 1.05), recorded disasters are only 4% of the loss while 65% is idiosyncratic and not disaster-linked (81% in low-income countries), and the global cycle explains just 6% of low-income growth variance, so a world risk pool removes over 90% of national risk and halving every shortfall would have left the average country about 8% richer after twenty years (the median country 5%).

№ 2026-83 · November 2026 · 26 min

Defining and Understanding Polycrisis Resilience

A country's composite resilience in the 2009 financial crisis correlates just 0.09 with its resilience in the 2020 pandemic, only 4 of 153 countries are in the top third in both (chance gives 4.5), and the five things the word covers agree only partly, so resilience should be defined as that of a system, to a class of shock, in a function, over a horizon, relative to a stated reference path.

№ 2026-82 · November 2026 · 27 min

A Unified Framework for Understanding and Mitigating the Global Polycrisis

Environmental exposure is uncorrelated with economic, technological and geopolitical exposure across 146 countries (|r| at most 0.05) and a single score keeps only 39% of the information; under 10,000 random weightings just three countries are reliably in the worst twenty and the median country's rank spans 62 places, so the framework should unify the language, the diagnosis and the response while keeping four scores and a capacity score visible.

№ 2026-81 · November 2026 · 25 min

Polycrisis Resilience This Century, 2000–2100

The world's disaster death rate fell 97% from the 1920s to the 1990s and has been flat since, while years with 100,000 or more deaths still come about one in five; on 2000–24 death rates and UN population paths the century's deaths run from about 3 million (capacity improving 3% a year) to 9 million (hazards growing 1% a year with no capacity gain), a factor of three that dwarfs the quarter-wide luck within any one path.

№ 2026-80 · November 2026 · 26 min

The Economics of Polycrisis Prevention: Quantifying the Human and Economic Returns of Resilience

Recorded disaster loss is so lumpy that the worst 1% of country-years hold 58% of damage and 76% of deaths, so an early-warning investment worth four dollars per dollar on average recovers its cost in only 69% of decades; it would return $51 per dollar in rich countries but $0.5 in the poorest on assets alone, and aiming it at the riskiest tenth by past deaths halves the cost per life but still misses two thirds of later deaths.

№ 2026-79 · November 2026 · 24 min

Polycrisis Resilience: Who Can Afford It?

In 34 of 141 countries, home to 2.7 billion people, central-government interest exceeds government health spending, and 17 of the 36 highest-risk countries are among them; the median low-income country's interest bill tripled to 1.9% of GDP since 2010 while health spending slipped to 0.9%, and a resilience programme worth 1% of GDP would cost a quarter of the squeezed countries' interest bill.