1. What is ‘better’?

How can humans, with the time they have before systems unravel and most capital is either erased or directed toward responding and adapting to accelerating disasters, make changes in socio-economic systems to (1) reduce the suffering caused during the polycrisis: to humans, other species, and the totality of life (Gaia), (Making the polycrisis less bad); and (2) reduce the likelihood of causing suffering once civilization restabilizes post-polycrisis, again to humans, other species, and Gaia (Setting up a better PPP)? Some of these interventions will be at odds with both ends, some will only help with one or the other, but some can address both. Exploring and categorizing these interventions could help policymakers, businesses, civil society, investors, and funders to prioritize certain interventions over others.

Some potential interventions are mapped in a 2 × 2 matrix (see Figure 1). This is not an exhaustive list, but includes a variety of examples worth discussing (primarily chosen because of ongoing policy attention and/or potential transformational value). The article will discuss each quadrant briefly, before focusing on the key Doubly Effective quadrant to explore those interventions that could potentially make both the polycrisis period and PPP better.

Figure 1. Potential polycrisis interventions and their effects.

2. Doubly not effective

At the most extreme, continuing business as usual – such as building more fossil-fuel-dependent power plants and expanding the consumer economy – will neither address suffering during the polycrisis (at least in sustainable ways that do not exacerbate suffering further) nor will this prepare future human societies for a post-polycrisis redevelopment (having turned vast swaths of natural capital into stuff). (An example: expanding the use of air conditioning to address extreme heat, which exacerbates climate change both through using more energy and more climate-changing refrigerants. In 2024, a councilman in New York City attempted to pass a law to require landlords to install and maintain air conditioning in their buildings (Howard, Reference Howard2024).) Nor will the high-tech engineering solutions that prop up the CCC economic system (under the guise of buying humanity time to implement solutions). Some of these could even make the PPP worse. For example, although carbon capture and storage (CCS) may delay the release of CO₂, it uses energy and resources to do so, generating its own ecological and climate impacts. And some forms may actually do long-term damage. A new CCS venture by Vaulted Earth plans to inject manure, food waste, and sewage into deep injection wells. Although these may be a temporary source of methane or CO₂, they are Earth's future soils, lost permanently (in human time scales) in the planet's depths (Frontier, 2024). Further, CCS must have a leakage rate of 0.01% or less per year to attain the same benefits of renewable energy. This, however, may be overly optimistic (DiGiulio, Reference DiGiulio2024).

The same is true with geoengineering interventions: if solar radiation management (SRM) reflects sunlight, keeping Earth cool for a time, this would not prevent CO₂ from accumulating, leading to increased ocean acidification and other detrimental effects (including on those who did not necessarily agree to such schemes) (Nicholson, Reference Nicholson2013), and could lead even to unexpected outcomes such as increased viral virility (Haddrell et al., Reference Haddrell, Oswin, Otero-Fernandez, Robinson, Cogan, Alexander, Mann, Hill, Finn, Davidson and Reid2024). And when society can no longer maintain SRM, assuming it did not use this time to shift to a low-impact economy and instead continued to sustain the CCC system, this could dramatically worsen PPP outcomes. (An interesting example of this can be seen through the inadvertent warming connected with reducing sulfur content of shipping fuels, which has led to a radiative forcing of +0.2 ± 0.11 W m⁻² across the global ocean (Yuan et al., Reference Yuan, Song, Oreopoulos, Wood, Bian, Breen, Chin, Yu, Barahona, Meyer and Platnick2024).)

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and biofuels also fit in this category as they prop up unsustainable economic practices (i.e. flying for leisure) as well as redirect limited agricultural lands toward growing energy crops, which in turn will either reduce available calories (most likely for the lowest income individuals) or increase pressure to convert forests or wild lands into farms. Currently, the U.S. government is actively supporting SAF development, as are corporations. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Loan Programs Office provided loan guarantees for two SAF facilities, each to the tune of $1.4 billion. One would convert corn into SAF, the other waste oils into SAF (both displacing other potential food uses of these inputs) (DOE, 2024a, 2024b). Worst of all, these types of interventions extend the social acceptance of firms that are inherently unsustainable, and as industries such as CCS grow, are creating new special interests that direct state and corporate resources toward less useful or even counterproductive actions.

3. Effective at softening the polycrisis (but not the PPP)

Although more difficult to identify interventions in this box, one example is large-scale renewable energy installations. Ultimately, these could help shift human society away from the use of fossil fuels and thus slow global warming, assuming the energy isn't just used to prop up the current CCC economic system. However, fields of solar panels, solar concentrating plants, and wind turbines may become unmanageable or unusable in a post-polycrisis scenario, depending both on how they are designed and built, and on the technological levels of future civilizations. Offshore wind, in particular, may become completely inaccessible as ships, cranes, and underwater cables require elaborate machinery to maintain. Small-scale renewables may be valuable in extending wellbeing in the PPP, assuming a level of technological know-how that allows for maintaining their usage.

Seawalls also fit here. These will take extensive investments and be limited in how much sea-level rise they can protect against. For example, New York City is considering a sea wall defense system, which would cost $119 billion and only protect against 2 ft of sea-level rise (Barnard, Reference Barnard2020). If these delay the inevitable loss of cities by just a few decades, this translates to a high level of expense for little gain, begging the question of whether these dollars (and carbon-based resources, such as cement) could not be spent better in other ways. Research after the 2011 tsunami in Japan found that building social infrastructure (e.g. community centers) was more strongly related to better recovery outcomes than building seawalls was (Fraser et al., Reference Fraser, Aldrich and Small2021). Further, the benefit of seawalls may come at the direct expense of certain populations in a city, such as in Jakarta where over 200,000 slum dwellers' homes may be destroyed for construction of coastal protections currently being considered (Yarina, Reference Yarina2018).

4. Effective at setting up a better PPP (but not softening the polycrisis)

Some interventions will do little to cushion the polycrisis and thus in all likelihood will have difficulty in securing resources or interest. However, they remain important, particularly in the case of a severe PPP.

Perhaps the most obvious example is cleaning up and securing nuclear waste sites and nuclear power plants as they are decommissioned (which, as many of the first generation of these are coming to the end of their lifespan, could be soon – possibly before the polycrisis period unfolds in earnest). The United States has 54 active nuclear power plants (consisting of 93 reactors) (Energy Information Administration, Reference Energy Information Administration2024) and 80 sites where nuclear waste is stored (Congressional Research Service, 2020). Each of these could cause ongoing and invisible suffering for generations of unsuspecting neighbors, nomads, or scavengers. Understanding the multi-millennial scope of this problem, the U.S. government even hired anthropologists to explore the best ways to communicate with future civilizations that may no longer speak English (Piesing, Reference Piesing2020). However, although that was a good question, very little has been done to actually clean up these sites, due to difficulties in siting a deep geologic nuclear waste repository. (Finland, which has successfully built a repository, may offer a useful case study in determining how other countries could effectively store their nuclear waste (El-Showk, Reference El-Showk2022).)

In 1990, Joanna Macy proposed creating nuclear guardianship groups – those who can, like monks of old, pass on oral history and knowledge of these danger zones (Macy, Reference Macy1990). Even if it is no longer possible to clean them up, those designated bodies could provide the knowledge to surrounding communities of what once was there and why they need to stay away. But ideally, investment will be made now in cleaning up waste and nuclear energy sites. (Ironically, instead there is an active push to re-open and expand nuclear power plants in the United States, driven by growing electricity demand. This includes re-opening a reactor at Three Mile Island (Microsoft, 2024), and sizable investments by companies (Google, 2024) and the Department of Energy in small modular reactors (DOE, 2024c).) The Ukraine/Russia war shows how risky nuclear power is. If conflict is part of the polycrisis (a high likelihood), combatants (state or non-state) could destroy nuclear plants either intentionally or by failing to provide electricity, or could use them as dangerous-to-assault fortresses. Nuclear Guardianship groups could be seeded and supported by diverse stakeholder groups of local governments, community leaders, and even religious organizations (which have a longevity few other institutions have) as an investment into the long-future. However, research turned up only one active Nuclear Guardianship working group, the Rocky Mountain Justice Center (2024), in Boulder, Colorado.

Also key will be preserving those simple technologies and techniques that could be lost during significant societal disruptions and state failures. These include everything from water purification, pasteurization, sanitation, midwifery, and basic medicine (both preventive, such as nutrition and vaccines, and curative, such as antibiotics and bone setting). Midwifery, for example, requires high levels of skill but uses almost no resources and minimizes the risk of infection and operational risks, critical in the low-tech PPP. In several post-Soviet countries, one can see the decline of healthcare, where complex medical services are only available to those with the resources to travel to other countries with better medical systems. In the case of a global polycrisis, far fewer will be able to afford medical tourism (and travel may be limited), thus preserving medical knowledge will be critical. Groups such as the Hesperian Foundation (2024), which has published and distributed books including Where There is No Doctor and Where There is No Dentist, are interesting starting points. Exploring how to keep this information distributed (and improved upon) to future apprentices even as global communications becomes more limited is critical. (Hesperian prints these guides as books, which may prove far more valuable in the polycrisis/PPP, where Internet access may be limited.)

Finally, protecting the deep sea may prove deeply valuable, not just as a stabilizing force in climate regulation or future discoveries, but because of the deep ocean's pivotal role in evolution (Boag et al., Reference Boag, Stockey, Elder, Hull and Sperling2018). If the very worst scenarios of the PPP play out (such as global nuclear conflict, or runaway climate change) and trigger vast losses in biodiversity, having an undisturbed deep ocean to reseed Earth's biodiversity may be essential (similar to an appendix recolonizing digestive tracts with gut microbiota). Thus, it is imperative to pass laws, conventions, mobilize investors to keep capital away from those that would pursue deep sea mining, and encourage companies to promise not to use minerals from deep sea mines. Further, factoring in total ecological costs, deep sea mining could actually cause $500 billion in value destruction (including $30–132 billion in mining industry losses) if pursued (Planet Tracker, 2024). Therefore, preventing deep sea mining would be a no regrets opportunity, even if most of the benefits are realized in the PPP.

5. Doubly effective

As there are limits in mobilizing both attention and resources for societal interventions, addressing this quadrant may make most sense, as it has potential benefits in reducing suffering both during the polycrisis period and the PPP.

6. Moving forward rather than in circles

Ultimately, just as humans have failed to have the foresight to avoid the polycrisis, they may also fail to act to lessen the severity of the polycrisis (let alone the PPP). This article cannot address how to overcome that resistance, but cultural pioneers, who strategically utilize the cultural power of the institutions they have influence over to normalize sustainability, will play an important role in drawing attention and resources toward some of the more constructive interventions (Assadourian, Reference Assadourian2010). And, if successful, they could well help reduce the suffering of many humans and non-humans in both the polycrisis period and PPP. If humanity fails, in all likelihood, we'll still find our way through the polycrisis, but the PPP may bring us not into a new balance with the planetary systems we depend on, but onto a path with another global polycrisis around the bend, just as in A Canticle for Leibowitz. Planning now for the PPP could help ensure that humanity only experiences one global polycrisis and no more.