Reports

87 Polycrisis

№ 2026-87 · November 2026 · 38 min

Polycrisis Resilience: A General Definition and the H Heuristics Framework

Polycrisis Resilience, a concept developed by Hunter Hughes, is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, economies, societies and interconnected systems to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, recover from and reduce vulnerability to multiple interacting crises; the H Heuristics framework builds it through development (the world death rate from natural disasters fell 98% between the 1920s and 2010s; composite capacity averages 22 in low-income and 70 in high-income countries, income explaining 81% of the variation), and a permutation test shows the clustering of weaknesses across 166 countries is almost entirely income.

86 Polycrisis

№ 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.

85 Development

№ 2026-85 · November 2026 · 26 min

Addressing Interconnected Global Crises Through Coordinated Economic Development

Earlier progress in one system predicts faster later progress in others (9 of 42 pairs significant against 2 by chance, mean standardised coefficient +0.095, stable across four time windows), with water and sanitation, power and income the strongest leading systems and health almost isolated; lopsided development is associated with worse survival in the pandemic (−0.33 standard deviations of life expectancy against trend per standard deviation of imbalance) but not with growth risk or disaster mortality, and water and sanitation is the highest-leverage bottleneck in 47 of 124 countries.

84 Resilience

№ 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%).

83 Polycrisis

№ 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.

82 Polycrisis

№ 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.

81 Polycrisis

№ 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.

80 Polycrisis

№ 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.

79 Polycrisis

№ 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.

78 Technology

№ 2026-78 · November 2026 · 24 min

Artificial Intelligence as an Accelerator of Global Development

High-income countries, with 17% of the world's people, generate 57% of Claude.ai usage and the five low-income countries with published data 0.2%; income alone explains 80% of usage per capita and English adds nothing, while 1.2 billion people live where doctors are fewest and digital foundations weakest, so the accelerator is not yet pointed at the need.

77 Energy Transition

№ 2026-77 · November 2026 · 26 min

Accelerating the Global Clean Energy Transition

World clean electricity gains about one percentage point a year, against 2.3 needed for a fully clean grid by 2050 and 3.8 by 2040, yet wind and solar additions have grown 19% a year since 2019 and coal, oil and gas use outside power is still rising. Five countries generate two thirds of fossil power, and if every country at least matched the pace of the fastest tenth of its income peers, world power would be about 95% clean by 2050 rather than 65%.

76 Technology

№ 2026-76 · November 2026 · 13 min

The Economics of Innovation Adoption

We know a lot about which innovations make communities more resilient: better seeds, cheaper solar, early warning, mobile money. We know far less about why some of them sweep through a population in a few years while others sit on the shelf for decades. The answer is mostly economics — and a polycrisis raises the stakes on getting it right.

75 Technology Diffusion

№ 2026-75 · October 2026 · 26 min

The Architecture of Global Technological Diffusion

Infrastructure-embedded technologies took a median of 26.5 years to go from 10% to 50% of US households, five times as long as stand-alone products; today no low-income country has passed 50% internet use, and the poorest trail the rich by 20 to 34 years or more on the technologies that matter most. Income, schooling, institutions, finance, power and place explain 86% of cross-country diffusion, vaccination escapes them, and at equal income each 10 points of diffusion goes with 19% lower child mortality.

74 Polycrisis

№ 2026-74 · October 2026 · 24 min

The Economics of Prevention Versus the Cost of Crisis

In 2015–2024 official donors spent $263 billion responding to crises in developing countries and $21 billion preventing them, 8 cents for every response dollar, while recorded disaster damage averaged $194 billion a year. Seventeen published estimates put prevention's return at 2 to 87 dollars per dollar across air pollution, climate, health, food, water, infrastructure, pandemics and conflict, and a cautious portfolio still returns several times its cost.

73 Energy Access

№ 2026-73 · October 2026 · 22 min

Financing Clean Energy Access in Emerging Economies

Sub-Saharan Africa has 89% of the world's people without electricity but received 28% of international public clean-energy finance in 2015–2024, about $82 per person without power over a decade. Twenty-five 'forgotten frontier' countries with 486 million people without electricity received 7%. Where finance does arrive, capital costs more than twice as much as in rich economies and currencies have lost three quarters of their value, so the price of money becomes the price of power.

72 Energy Transition

№ 2026-72 · October 2026 · 24 min

The Clean Energy Trajectory

Clean sources met all of the growth in world electricity demand in 2025 and solar modules are 95% cheaper than in 2010, yet nearly two billion people still use under a megawatt-hour a year. Against a stalled transition, a 1.5 °C pathway avoids 106 billion person-years of hazardous heat, about 54 million deaths from fossil-fuel air pollution, nearly all energy poverty and $18 trillion of fuel imports by 2050. The binding constraints are finance, grids and institutions, not technology.

71 Polycrisis

№ 2026-71 · October 2026 · 24 min

The Polycrisis Apocalypse Humanity Is Facing

On a central measure, 1.2 billion people (16% of humanity) live today where two or more survivability tiers bind on weak institutions; holding today's institutions fixed, warming lifts that to 2.8–4.5 billion by the 2090s, three in five of them in Africa. With 65 armed conflicts in 2025, the most since 1946, and an unsafe equilibrium that could outlast every past civilisation, the cheapest time to choose the buffered path is now.

70 Global Health

№ 2026-70 · October 2026 · 22 min

Healthcare Convergence in the Developing World

The life-expectancy gap between developing and high-income countries fell from 25 years in 1960 to 8.4 today, but it closed four times faster before 2000 than since, and coverage growth has halved since 2015. Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam show good health at low cost, yet in the median low-income country governments spend $7 a person on health, households pay nearly half of all costs, and an essential package would cost 11% of GDP.

69 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-69 · October 2026 · 24 min

The Survivability Trap

By 2087, most of humanity will live in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia. By the 2090s, the median person would live at a mean annual temperature of 26–28 °C, up from 22 °C, and the worst-off quarter beyond 28.5–29.4 °C, with one to more than two months of dangerous heat a year, in air already six times dirtier than the WHO guideline. A low-emissions, high-development path keeps unprecedented heat to 0.6 billion people instead of 3.8 billion.

68 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-68 · October 2026 · 22 min

Human Exposure Across the Polycrisis Century

By the 2090s, 4.3 to 9.3 billion people will live with frequent heat, extreme rain or long dry spells, up from 3.4 billion. The exposed population ages fast: heat exposure among people 65 and over rises nearly tenfold, to 1.3 billion. If schooling keeps rising and protecting as it has, harm falls by 70–84% in three pathways, but under SSP3 protection only holds harm level, and heat harm rises 39%.

67 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-67 · October 2026 · 22 min

The Compound Hazard Century

Droughts have barely become more frequent, but they have become hot. Half of warm-season drought months in 1995–2024 were also extremely hot, up from three in ten in 1951–80 and seven in ten in 2021–24. Dry-to-wet whiplash is up 30%, and hot-dry years produce the great smoke and dust events. By the 2090s, 0.34 billion people would live with two or more compound hazards on a low-emissions path, 5.2 billion on a high one.

66 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-66 · October 2026 · 20 min

The Geography of Global Vulnerability

1.66 billion people live where two or more climate hazards overlap, but only 158 million of them also have limited means to adapt. They are concentrated in the heat-and-drought belt from Senegal to Pakistan and on cyclone coasts from Madagascar to Haiti. By 2050 that overlap nearly triples to 455 million, led by Nigeria. Halving poverty and strengthening coping would cut it to 263 million, more than lower emissions alone (356 million), though not in the most fragile states.

65 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-65 · October 2026 · 22 min

The Global Polycrisis and the Architecture of Systemic Risk

Multi-domain shock years rose from about 6% of countries a year before 2020 to 9% since, after 33% in 2020. The observed network has a sink: economic shocks, internet shutdowns and governance shocks raise the next year's risk of displacement or mortality shocks 2.5, 2.0 and 1.6 times. Low-income countries carry eleven times the multi-domain burden of rich ones, and twenty countries with 705 million people face a 30% or higher modelled risk of multi-domain shocks in 2026.

64 Urbanisation

№ 2026-64 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Geography of Growing Human Exposure

The world adds 1.43 billion people by 2050, 69% of them in cities and 57% in sub-Saharan Africa. People living with 30 or more days a year above a 35 °C heat index more than double, from 1.9 to 4.1 billion. Warming drives 1.74 billion of that rise and population growth 0.44 billion, and growth lands disproportionately in hot places. City dwellers in 100-year flood zones, 507 million today, are heading for 630–690 million.

63 Human Capital

№ 2026-63 · October 2026 · 21 min

Convergent Development as Polycrisis Risk Reduction

Countries vulnerable in 2000 have closed their human-development gap at about 0.3% a year, a half-life of two centuries. Those that avoided reversals closed it three times faster, while reversals erased 13% of their gains. Higher human development makes reversals shallower and polycrisis risk lower (r = −0.84). Faster convergence with halved reversals would bring 38 of 60 vulnerable countries past an HDI of 0.70 by 2050, against 17 at the recent pace.

62 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-62 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Architecture of Global Polycrisis Mitigation

Every national architecture has a weak link: the median country's weakest function trails its average by 16 points, and decoupling, the most common gap, barely tracks income. In 2020–2023 national capacities explained almost none of the growth and inflation damage, but steering was the exception, associated with 62 fewer excess deaths per 100,000 and a 5.7-point smaller rise in hunger. Thin buffers leave 3.5 billion people relying on a global backstop that covers a fraction of need.

61 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-61 · October 2026 · 21 min

The Human Dividend of Polycrisis Prevention

About 11.6 million people a year die in six channels that polycrisis prevention targets. Matching the best quarter of income peers would protect 4.6 million of them and reaching the next income tier 7.0 million, but doing both would protect 8.6 million. The burdens cluster in the same 55 countries and share drivers such as health coverage and sanitation, and closing the gaps by 2040 would protect about 172 million lives by 2050.

60 Energy Transition

№ 2026-60 · October 2026 · 20 min

The Clean Transition as a Polycrisis Mitigation Strategy

In 2022 the median fuel importer's bill jumped from 4.5% to 7.4% of GDP, and the jump tracked how much each country imported, not how clean its power was (r = −0.08). Import bills are mostly oil and gas for transport, heat and industry, so the transition protects only when it reaches those uses. When it does, it also cuts the 86% of fossil air-pollution deaths borne by importers and the emissions behind climate risk.

59 Public Health

№ 2026-59 · October 2026 · 20 min

Addressing the Pollution–Poverty–Climate Feedback Loop

Burning coal, oil, gas and biofuels caused 48% of the 3.8 million deaths from outdoor fine particles in 2017, the same combustion that drives climate change. Each million tonnes of fossil CO₂ carries about 105 deaths a year in lower-middle-income countries and 9 in rich ones, so poorer countries, which emit 11% of fossil CO₂, bear 34% of fossil-fuel air-pollution deaths. Cleaning the air must be paired with methane cuts: alone it adds 0.26°C by 2050, but with methane cuts only 0.02°C.

58 Human Capital

№ 2026-58 · October 2026 · 20 min

Sustainable Development as Global Risk Reduction

Each 0.1 rise in the Human Development Index goes with about 63% fewer people hit by climate disasters, 62% fewer near-poor and 25% less death from communicable disease. Within countries over time, the share affected by climate disasters falls 40% per 0.1. Yet human development gains in 2019–2023 were half those of the 2000s, the gap between low- and very-high-HDI countries has stopped closing, and development has not damped growth volatility or pandemic mortality. Those tail risks need their own institutions.

57 Environment & Biodiversity

№ 2026-57 · October 2026 · 20 min

Escaping the Pollution–Poverty Trap

Forty-eight countries, 36 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in two or more degradation cycles, and they hold 78% of the world's extremely poor. Polluting cooking fuel, missing sanitation and forest loss move together even among countries at the same income. Fifty-two countries escaped at least one cycle after 2000, through clean-cooking drives, sanitation campaigns and forest recovery, and cut extreme poverty by a median 26 points, more than twice as much as those that stayed trapped. Air pollution is the cycle growth has not broken.

56 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-56 · October 2026 · 20 min

Breaking the Climate–Development Trap

After a severe climate shock, GDP per person in low- and lower-middle-income countries falls by 1.7%, sinks to about 5% below its previous path within four years and is still 3.7% lower after eight. Upper-middle-income countries recover within four years, and earthquakes leave no lasting scar. Low-income countries now suffer climate shocks in a quarter of all years, only one in five of these has any recorded damage, and the income gap between the median rich and poor country has grown from 18 to 25 times since 1990.

55 Energy Transition

№ 2026-55 · October 2026 · 20 min

The Green Development Dividend

Closing every extreme-poverty gap with targeted transfers would add just 0.07% to global CO₂. Reaching the same goal through broad growth at today's carbon intensity would add about 100 times as much. Most countries escaped mass poverty at under 2 tonnes of CO₂ per person, and 44 developing countries with 4.2 billion people cut poverty and carbon intensity together after 2015. Explicit fossil-fuel subsidies of $725 billion a year are more than six times the extreme-poverty gap.

54 Energy Transition

№ 2026-54 · October 2026 · 19 min

The Clean Cooking Transition

In low- and middle-income countries, 69% of people now cook mainly with gas or electricity, up from 27% in 1990, but 2.03 billion still rely on wood, charcoal, coal or kerosene. In sub-Saharan Africa the number using polluting fuels has risen by about 340 million since 2000, and charcoal users have more than tripled. At least 1.37 billion people without clean cooking already have electricity, which makes efficient electric cooking a second lane alongside LPG. Even so, the 2015–2023 pace would leave about 1.6 billion people without clean cooking in 2030.

53 Human Capital

№ 2026-53 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Education–Climate Vulnerability Trap

Half the world's school-age children — 962 million in 35 countries — live where most 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text and climate hazard is high. Children's exposure to dangerous heat doubles by mid-century, with sub-Saharan Africa's share tripling to a quarter, yet only one in five primary schools in low-income countries has electricity to run a fan. Because schooling is among the strongest predictors of how well people cope with disasters, every lost school day today weakens tomorrow's resilience.

52 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-52 · October 2026 · 17 min

Demographic Growth Inside the Global Risk Envelope

Since 1975 the world's urban centres have added 2.1 billion people, and growth has leaned into the floodplain: the urban population in 100-year river flood zones tripled to 507 million while cities as a whole grew 2.3 times, with one new resident in six settling in a flood zone. Six in ten new city dwellers settled in cities exposed to at least one major hazard, and 746 million now live where two or more compound. Most of the growth still to come is unbuilt — the cheapest moment for safer settlement decisions.

51 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-51 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Global Water Polycrisis

The water polycrisis has two faces. In 35 countries with 4.1 billion people, from Egypt to India and China, water is physically scarce: withdrawals exceed 40% of supply, agriculture takes three-quarters and aquifers are falling. In 47 countries with 1.6 billion people, mostly in Africa, water is plentiful but nearly a third of people lack basic water, unsafe water kills at six times the rate of well-served countries and grids hang on hydropower. They meet in Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen — and each needs a different fix.

50 Public Health

№ 2026-50 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Pollution–Development Trap

In 35 countries with 1.45 billion people, from Nigeria to Bangladesh, fine-particle pollution is stuck high or still rising while income stays below $10,000 a head — and growth has not cleaned the air of the poorest third of countries at all. The loop runs both ways: poverty means smoky fuels and weak regulation, and pollution costs 3.7 years of life expectancy in lower-middle-income countries and erodes human capital. China turned the corner at $14,000 a head and India at about $7,000 — proof that clean air can come early, as growth policy rather than its reward.

49 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-49 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Geography of Human Vulnerability Through 2100

Humanity's centre of gravity is drifting 1,700 km towards the hot belt from West Africa to South Asia just as that belt crosses danger-level heat. By the 2090s, 2.2 billion people live with a month or more of it in a middle-of-the-road world and 5.0 billion in a fragmented, high-emission one — nearly half of them people not yet born in places not yet dangerous. Low emissions and education-led development each cut that exposure by half or more, and because half of it sits on 0.5% of inhabited land, protection can be targeted.

48 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-48 · October 2026 · 16 min

The Global Climate–Pollution Risk Atlas

Thirty-six countries with 3.0 billion people combine high climate hazard, high pollution exposure and weak coping capacity — across the Sahel, West and Central Africa and South Asia. The opportunity is concentrated too: the 60 countries breathing 25 µg/m³ or more emit 74% of the world's coal CO₂ and half its greenhouse gases, so in a handful of airsheds the same coal and methane cuts that slow warming would clean the air for billions.

47 Public Health

№ 2026-47 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Geography of Human Pollution Exposure

Pollution and people concentrate in the same places: the average person breathes air 1.53 times dirtier than the average inhabited square kilometre. But most of a city's pollution is not its own — in the median city the background 165 km away is 79% as polluted as the centre, and the wind carries city smoke downwind. Exposure is most unequal by income: 41.7 µg/m³ for lower-middle-income countries, 3.2 times the high-income level — so clean air needs regional, not just urban, action.

46 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-46 · October 2026 · 18 min

Human Survivability Under the Global Polycrisis

Disasters kill far fewer people than they did — 6 per million a year in the 2010s against 99 in the 1960s — because capacity rose faster than threat. Within countries, each extra year of adult schooling has cut deaths per 1,000 people affected by about a third. Projected to 2100, that capacity keeps winning in most futures, but not in a fragmented, high-warming SSP3 world, where population and hazard outpace schooling and expected deaths rise in two-thirds of countries.

45 Emerging Markets

№ 2026-45 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Architecture of Global Convergence Under Systemic Risk

Development has been dismantling the slow crises: since the early 2000s child deaths fell in 98% of developing economies, emissions intensity in 88% and hunger in 76%. The fast systemic crises did not follow: debt service improved in only 31%, conflict in 39% and inflation in 46%, and income growth explains none of them. Beyond growth itself, only government effectiveness and clean water predict broad crisis reduction — and with convergence now stalled at 49% of economies, the missing floors are institutional.

44 Technology

№ 2026-44 · October 2026 · 18 min

Digital Infrastructure as a Resilience Multiplier in Crisis-Prone Developing Economies

Digital rails speed up crisis response — India, Brazil and Pakistan paid emergency cash within 7–8 days in 2020 — but they do not replace a capable state. Across 207 shocks since 1991 and the COVID recession, government effectiveness predicts recovery far better than internet use. The exception is telling: where governance is weak, every 10 extra points of account ownership before COVID went with about 7 percentage-point-years less lost output by 2023. Digital infrastructure multiplies thin state capacity most.

43 Conflict & Fragility

№ 2026-43 · October 2026 · 19 min

Resource Scarcity, Environmental Stress, and the Escalation of Armed Conflict

Scarcity is an accelerant, not a detonator. Drought cuts cereal yields by about 6% and doubles the odds of a crop failure, but in the same country an ordinary dry year barely changes the risk of war. Severe droughts raise the chance a new conflict starts the next year by about 60%, and in fragile states local droughts shift fighting toward communal and militia violence. Violence concentrates where scarcity meets weak states: 24 such countries, 7% of humanity, suffered 37% of conflict deaths in 2016–24.

42 Climate Change

№ 2026-42 · October 2026 · 17 min

Wet-Bulb Temperatures and the Emerging Geography of Unsurvivable Heat

No site analysed reaches the 35 °C wet-bulb ceiling before about 4.4 °C of global warming; the binding line is lower. Healthy young adults lose the ability to cool themselves in humid heat near 30.5 °C, a level 11 of 161 sites reached for at least an hour in 2024. Under current policies, about 2.8 °C, the cities touching it would hold 161 million people, up from 9 million today — around the Gulf, across South Asia and in eastern China.

41 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-41 · October 2026 · 16 min

Six of Nine Boundaries Breached — What Transgressing Planetary Limits Actually Means

The 2023 headline was six of nine planetary boundaries breached; by 2025–26 it is seven, all worsening. Measured as a multiple of the disturbance each boundary allows, humanity has used 2.1 times its CO₂ allowance, 3.1 times its climate-forcing allowance, about 2.7–2.9 times its nitrogen and phosphorus allowances and 11 to 111 times its extinction allowance. Each boundary translates into a budget, a floor, a ceiling or a ban — and the ozone layer shows a breached boundary can be brought back.

40 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-40 · October 2026 · 18 min

Heat Stress, Labor Productivity, and the Hidden Economic Cost of Warming

Heat cut work capacity enough in 2024 to put about $490 billion of output at risk, a conservative estimate from hourly heat stress in 149 cities. The Lancet Countdown's broader estimate is $1.09 trillion. Either figure is of the same order as all climate damages in the DICE model at 1.5 °C. The loss is regressive (3% of hours in lower-middle-income countries against 0.2% in rich ones) and convex: one extra degree adds 73%, two nearly triple it. Moving work out of the afternoon recovers 20–30%.

39 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-39 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Geography of Human Survivability Under Climate Stress

Where coping capacity is strong, recorded deaths from floods, storms, droughts, landslides and wildfires stay near 0.6 per million people a year whether hazard is low or high. Where it is weak they rise to 8.7 per million in the most exposed third — a 14-fold gap. About 14,000 recorded deaths a year are avoidable at that benchmark, and the true toll is larger because heat deaths are counted almost only in rich countries.

38 Public Health

№ 2026-38 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Compounding Burden of Heat and Air Pollution

Very hot days are deadlier when the air is dirty: across 620 cities, a very hot day raised deaths by 12.8% when particle pollution was high against 5.3% when it was low. And the two hazards travel together — in 2024 ozone was higher on hot days in 131 of 149 large cities. About 2.6 billion people live in countries that are both hot and polluted, three-quarters of the population of lower-middle-income countries against 4% in high-income ones.

37 Public Health

№ 2026-37 · October 2026 · 16 min

The Unequal Geography of Human Air Pollution Exposure

The poorest half of humanity breathes 66% of the world's fine-particle exposure above the WHO guideline. Exposure peaks not in the poorest countries but in lower-middle-income ones, where industry, dense cities and solid-fuel cooking coincide: their population-weighted average is 42.5 µg/m³, against 12.5 in high-income countries. Since 2010 three in four high-income countries have cleaned their air, against fewer than half of lower-middle-income ones.

36 Climate Change

№ 2026-36 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Pollution–Climate Feedback System

Air pollution currently hides a large share of greenhouse warming: sulphur dioxide alone has offset about 0.4°C. Cleaning the air without also cutting methane adds warming in the IPCC's own scenario data, while cleaning the air and cutting methane together removes almost all of that penalty by 2050. Pollution and climate are one feedback system, and the levers that work on both — methane, black carbon and ozone precursors — come first.

35 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-35 · October 2026 · 16 min

Human Exposure Across the Polycrisis Century

Humanity will live about 739 billion person-years between 2025 and 2100. On current trends, 180 billion of them will be spent under at least two of three hazards: polluted air, a hot climate and a high-risk country. Counting exposure cumulatively shows that clean air and resilience with peace each avoid more of those years this century than the gap between warming pathways, though mitigation decides how many people end up near the edge of the human climate niche.

34 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-34 · October 2026 · 17 min

Mapping the Interdependencies of Twenty-First-Century Risk

Across 191 countries and 18 indicators, about half of what makes risks travel together is poverty: average link strength halves once income is held constant. What survives is a tighter web centred on conflict, displacement, resource dependence and rapid population growth. Countries stressed in three or more domains are almost all unstable, and the hubs point to where intervention breaks the most links at once.

33 Energy Transition

№ 2026-33 · October 2026 · 17 min

S-Curves Against the Clock

Electric-car sales are on an S-curve that takes them from 10% to 90% in about ten years, and solar power in about seventeen, but the energy system's low-carbon share is moving at a pace that would take 170 years. A transparent race model shows that keeping peak warming below 2°C needs the whole system to move at roughly wind's pace, and below 1.7°C at solar's. The budget for 1.5°C runs out around 2028 on every path.

32 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-32 · October 2026 · 17 min

Global Survivability Under Compounding Twenty-First-Century Risks

From 2000 to 2024, about 174 million children died before their fifth birthday, more than ten times the 14.9 million excess deaths of the pandemic's first two years. Today 69% of those child deaths fall in the high-risk countries that hold a quarter of humanity. Matching the best quarter of each income group would avert 2.4 million child deaths a year, nearly half the total, and 34 million more by 2050 than on current trends.

31 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-31 · October 2026 · 17 min

Human Exposure to the Global Polycrisis, 2025–2100

Even if no hazard worsened, the share of humanity living in today's high-risk countries would rise from a quarter to 43% by 2100, because population is growing fastest where risk is highest. About half of the 9.5 billion babies due between now and 2100 will be born in those countries. Combining UN population projections with the INFORM risk map shows who is exposed, where and in which generation, and how far reducing risk could offset demography.

30 Infrastructure

№ 2026-30 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Infrastructure of Sustainable Economic Convergence

Across 110 economies that started the century below half the OECD's income, starting poorer did not mean growing faster. Among countries with similar access to power and similar outage rates, poorer ones caught up about a percentage point a year faster for each halving of starting income. Mapping catch-up growth since 2000 against electricity, logistics, cooling and connectivity shows power as the binding gate and the others as multipliers that depend on it.

29 Infrastructure

№ 2026-29 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Global South Resilience Stack

Internet use has exceeded electricity access by more than five points in only 10 of 3,072 country-years across the Global South, and health coverage has rarely passed 60 before electricity reaches 90 per cent. Yet health is the slowest layer to build. On current trends only 28 of 129 low- and middle-income countries reach universal energy, water, health and digital access by 2050. Their data shows the order in which to build.

28 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-28 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Geography of Global Vulnerability

A quarter of humanity, 2 billion people, lives in countries at high or very high risk of humanitarian crisis, and all 16 of the highest-risk countries score 8.4 or more out of 10 for conflict hazard. Mapping 191 countries on the INFORM Risk Index shows that hazard is not destiny. Coping infrastructure improved in 154 countries over 2017–2026 while institutions stalled, and matching each country's income peers would cut the population at high risk by more than half.

27 Public Health

№ 2026-27 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Pollution–Climate Risk Nexus

Extreme wildfires have more than doubled in two decades, methane rose at record pace in 2020–21 as warming wetlands released more, and ozone already cuts global soybean yields by about an eighth. Mapping five pollution–climate feedback loops shows where each can be cut most cheaply, from leaking gas wells to cooking stoves.

26 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-26 · October 2026 · 16 min

The Polycrisis Bill

Disasters, heat, pollution, violence and the climate damage locked in by each year's emissions already cost between 1.2 and 23.5 per cent of world output a year, depending on what is counted. Over 2025–2100 that adds up to hundreds of trillions to several quadrillion dollars, and prevention would cost a fraction of it.

25 Emerging Markets

№ 2026-25 · October 2026 · 18 min

Africa Ascendant

Africa's share of humanity is returning to its seventeenth-century level and then far exceeding it, from 13.5 per cent in 2000 to a projected 37.5 per cent by 2100. Five centuries of African demography, from 1500 to scenarios for 2500, alongside the diaspora and the mixed ancestry that spreads African heritage worldwide far faster than migration does.

24 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-24 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Polycrisis Apocalypse

What if the polycrisis outran humanity's capacity to manage it? The Polycrisis Apocalypse, a term coined by H Heuristics, names a slow collapse of industrial civilisation followed by centuries of regression. Past collapses, a stress-versus-repair model readers can run and today's ledger of ten crisis domains show how it could happen, and what keeps it hypothetical.

23 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-23 · October 2026 · 16 min

Resilience in an Age of Polycrisis

Exposure did not decide how hard the 2021–23 food-price cascade hit; falling currencies did. Tracing that shock month by month from gas to fertiliser, grains and household food inflation in 183 countries — and the 2026 Strait of Hormuz shock along the same chain — gives a framework for when to diversify, decouple, buffer and absorb.

22 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-22 · October 2026 · 12 min

The Polycrisis Century

Food, oil, markets, policy, conflict and disasters rarely go wrong in the same year: their year-to-year correlation averages 0.12. In the 2020s they did, with an average of 3.5 of six acute indicators in their worst quartile each year against 0.7 in the 2010s, on a chronic floor of record temperatures, conflict and displacement.

21 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-21 · October 2026 · 12 min

Polycrisis Resilience in the Twenty-First Century

Seventy-three countries are both highly vulnerable to shocks and poorly prepared to adapt, including 23 of the 24 low-income economies. Mapping the pressures converging on the world system against the adaptive capacity of 190 countries, and the financial buffers between them, shows where shocks become crises — with a country explorer built on the ND-GAIN index.

20 Emerging Markets

№ 2026-20 · October 2026 · 22 min

The Last Third

With the 2030 Agenda two-thirds spent, 36 per cent of assessable SDG targets are on track or moving moderately and 15 per cent have gone into reverse. The pattern beneath those numbers is not random, and it says a good deal about where the remaining effort should go.

19 Energy Transition

№ 2026-19 · September 2026 · 23 min

From Payments to Power

Mobile payments connect households to pay-as-you-go solar, but digital collection alone does not make an energy portfolio bankable. This report examines the infrastructure, contract economics and financing structures that turn small payments into durable energy access.

18 Emerging Markets

№ 2026-18 · September 2026 · 21 min

Convergence Without Absorption

Half of developing economies have not narrowed the income gap since 2019. The pathways now proposed in manufacturing's place — digital services, agro-processing, green industry, minerals — are tradable and productive, and they absorb a fraction of the labour. That splits convergence into measures that used to move together.

17 Energy Transition

№ 2026-17 · September 2026 · 21 min

Navigating the Transition

Forecasts of fossil demand now disagree about the direction after 2030, which makes prediction a poor basis for policy. What is not in dispute is that resource revenue is becoming shorter-dated and more variable. That is an asset–liability problem, and it has four known treatments.

16 Energy Transition

№ 2026-16 · September 2026 · 20 min

Convergence Through Crisis

Pakistan imported 17 GW of solar panels in a single year. South Africa's rooftops went from under 1 GW to over 7 GW. Lebanon's solar capacity rose thirteenfold. None of these were planned transitions; all followed a crisis that made the incumbent unaffordable or unavailable. This report asks what determines whether such a window produces a leapfrog or a diesel generator.

15 Development Finance

№ 2026-15 · September 2026 · 21 min

Financing the Synergy

The case for investing in adaptation and mitigation together is physical and well established. The obstacle is not the argument but the cash flow: an avoided loss has no revenue line, so private capital funds about nine per cent of adaptation. This report sets out five instruments that convert avoided losses into something financeable, and how to use them without splitting the asset.

14 Emerging Markets

№ 2026-14 · September 2026 · 21 min

Food, Energy, Water: Disruption and Substitution

Nexus disruptions travel along whichever link is tightest: gas into fertiliser into food in 2022, drought into hydropower and into shipping lanes in 2023 and 2024. Clean technologies break those particular chains — and create new ones. This report maps four substitutions, what each buys, and what each newly requires.

13 Emerging Markets

№ 2026-13 · September 2026 · 22 min

Climate-Resilient Industrialization Pathways

Green industrial strategy tends to offer every sector the same package. But an aluminium smelter is stopped by the price of electricity, an electronics plant by a four-hour outage, and a garment factory by a heatwave or a flood. Sorting industries by their binding constraint produces a different — and cheaper — sequence of investments.

12 Energy Transition

№ 2026-12 · September 2026 · 22 min

Integrating Adaptation and Mitigation

Climate policy treats adaptation and mitigation as parallel agendas competing for finance. In economies building both capital stocks at once, they are better understood as complements in production — with a minority of cases where they genuinely compete. This report sets out where the dependencies run, where the conflicts are real, and how to appraise an asset that discharges both duties.

11 Public Health

№ 2026-11 · September 2026 · 24 min

Air Quality Improvement as a Co-Benefit of Clean Energy Transition in Megacities

Air pollution contributed to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, and an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths a year are attributable to fossil-fuel air pollution that a transition would remove. The burden is heaviest in the thirty-three megacities, where combustion is densest and exposure closest. This report sets out the evidence that decarbonization is, in practice, the largest public-health programme available to them, and how to design it to collect that return.

10 Institutions & Governance

№ 2026-10 · September 2026 · 20 min

Climate Litigation Goes South

Climate litigation was a northern sport: a Dutch foundation, a German grandmother, an American youth cohort. In the past decade the centre of gravity has shifted south, where courts have ordered governments to implement their own climate laws, blocked coal plants and deforestation, and written a right to a stable climate into constitutions that never mentioned it.

09 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-09 · September 2026 · 19 min

Scaling Low-Cost Adaptation Technologies Across Climate-Vulnerable Developing Economies

Cheap adaptation technologies with strong measured returns are distributed and then abandoned. The usual explanations blame the money or the country, but neither accounts for two technologies diffusing at wildly different rates through the same channel. Five attributes of the product explain most of the variation.

08 Public Health

№ 2026-08 · September 2026 · 18 min

One Source, Two Signs

Climate change and air pollution come out of the same combustion, which has made it natural to treat them as one problem. They differ in residence time by five orders of magnitude, in the geography of their harm, and in the sign of their effect on the planet's energy balance — and each difference changes what a combined strategy can do.

07 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-07 · September 2026 · 17 min

A Proactive Strategy for Mitigating the Twenty-First-Century Polycrisis

Every serious polycrisis strategy names the same four elements, and the list has never been the problem. The four differ in who captures their benefit and in whether anyone but the beneficiary can supply them — which determines the instrument that can deliver each, and explains why combined strategies underperform their parts.

06 Infrastructure

№ 2026-06 · September 2026 · 19 min

Climate Adaptation as Infrastructure for Global Polycrisis Risk Reduction

Adaptation is counted as a stock of assets, but what protects people is a service that keeps working, and a service runs on a chain. Reliability multiplies rather than averages, so where an investment sits in the network matters more than what it costs — and polycrisis is the case where the links fail together.

05 Systemic Risk

№ 2026-05 · September 2026 · 19 min

The Economics of Prevention in an Age of Polycrisis

Prevention is appraised against doing nothing. Its real alternative is emergency response — already being paid for, repeatedly, at surge prices, on crisis financing, leaving no asset and restoring the exposure that produced the loss. The obstacles are institutional, not economic.

04 Public Health

№ 2026-04 · September 2026 · 21 min

Breaking the Pollution–Poverty–Climate Nexus in Emerging Economies

Pollution, poverty and climate cause one another in every direction, and are managed by three ministries on three timetables. Integrated strategies keep failing not because the analysis is wrong but because integrated things must still be bought by a single budget holder on a single clock. The remedy is to appraise on the fastest.

03 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-03 · September 2026 · 24 min

Climate Adaptation and Development Convergence Across the Global South

Poor countries only began catching up with rich ones around 2000, and the resulting convergence runs at one to two per cent of the income gap a year. Climate hazard already destroys one to two per cent of output a year in low- and middle-income countries. Adaptation, read against convergence, is not insurance but growth-retention policy.

02 Climate Adaptation

№ 2026-02 · September 2026 · 23 min

Scaling Climate Adaptation Through Development Finance and Technology Diffusion

The resilience gap is usually described as a shortage of money. It is better understood as two gaps wearing one name — hard adaptation blocked at a capital gate, soft adaptation blocked at a delivery gate — and neither closes while both are treated as the first.

01 Energy Transition

№ 2026-01 · September 2026 · 22 min

The Clean Transition as Global Polycrisis Mitigation Infrastructure

The clean transition is usually argued as climate policy — a cost accepted now for a distant temperature. Read instead as risk-mitigation infrastructure, it lowers four coupled dangers at once: climate destabilisation, air-pollution mortality, energy insecurity and coercive energy geopolitics. The operative variable is not ambition but deployment.