Transdisciplinary sustainability scientists work with many different actors in pursuit of change. In so doing they make choices about why and how to engage with different perspectives in their research. Reflexivity – active individual and collective critical reflection – is considered an important capacity for researchers to address the resulting ethical and practical challenges. We developed a framework for reflexivity as a transformative capacity in sustainability science through a critical systems approach, which helps make any decisions that influence which perspectives are included or excluded in research explicit. We suggest that transdisciplinary sustainability research can become more transformative by nurturing reflexivity.

Transdisciplinary sustainability science is increasingly applied to study transformative change. Yet, transdisciplinary research involves diverse actors who hold contrasting and sometimes conflicting perspectives and worldviews. Reflexivity is cited as a crucial capacity for navigating the resulting challenges, yet notions of reflexivity are often focused on individual researcher reflections that lack explicit links to the collective transdisciplinary research process and predominant modes of inquiry in the field. This gap presents the risk that reflexivity remains on the periphery of sustainability science and becomes ‘unreflexive’, as crucial dimensions are left unacknowledged. Our objective was to establish a framework for reflexivity as a transformative capacity in sustainability science through a critical systems approach. We developed and refined the framework through a rapid scoping review of literature on transdisciplinarity, transformation, and reflexivity, and reflection on a scenario study in the Red River Basin (US, Canada). The framework characterizes reflexivity as the capacity to nurture a dynamic, embedded, and collective process of self-scrutiny and mutual learning in service of transformative change, which manifests through interacting boundary processes – boundary delineation, interaction, and transformation. The case study reflection suggests how embedding this framework in research can expose boundary processes that block transformation and nurture more reflexive and transformative research.

Transdisciplinary sustainability research may become more transformative by nurturing reflexivity as a dynamic, embedded, and collective learning process.

The research paper studies business sophistication, tax revenue policies, and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance across 105 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries spanning from 2013 to 2021. Key insights from the study underscore a positive association between business sophistication and ESG performance. This suggests that organizations leveraging advanced knowledge and innovation are better positioned to implement effective ESG strategies. Moreover, higher tax revenue is linked to better ESG, underlining a commitment to sustainability within the business landscape. Notably, Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) emerges as a pivotal catalyst in augmenting ESG performance, particularly when integrated with business sophistication and tax revenue mechanisms.

This study examines the relationship between business sophistication, tax revenue policies, and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance in 105 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries from 2013 to 2021, focusing on the moderating role of Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT). Using advanced econometric methods like Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS), two-step Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and fixed-effect regression, the research also considers factors such as microfinance institutions, commercial bank financing, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal a significant positive link between business sophistication and ESG performance, indicating that companies with advanced knowledge and innovation are more likely to implement successful ESG policies. Higher tax revenue is also positively correlated with ESG improvements, reflecting support for sustainability. ICT is crucial in enhancing ESG performance, especially when combined with business sophistication and tax revenue. Microfinance and commercial banking are vital in promoting ESG practices in BRI countries. Despite a temporary decline in ESG performance due to COVID-19, the study predicts a post-pandemic resurgence, emphasizing the need to foster an innovation culture for sustainable development.

There is a positive association between business sophistication, tax revenues, microfinance, ICT, and commercial banking, which are key drivers of better ESG performance in BRI countries.

At the heart of the polycrisis debate is the struggle to grapple with both the scientific and political uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The struggles over what to do about the polycrisis are thus found at the intersection of science and politics. We must approach the polycrisis as simultaneously a scientific and political challenge. To do so we propose that the polycrisis project adopts the methods of decision-making under deep uncertainty as a way to integrate and encourage collaborations between the scientific and policy worlds.

The polycrisis concept points to the interaction of multiple global crises and, arguably, to the difficulties in grasping the current moment with conceptual clarity. While Lawrence et al. emphasize the causal relations between crises in multiple global systems to define and operationalize the concept, we argue that they underestimate the politics of knowledge claims about the polycrisis, from the concept's performative function, from the normative claims it enacts or enables, and from the program of action that it carries or implies. We argue instead that at the heart of the polycrisis debate is the struggle to grapple with the (deep) uncertainties – both scientific and political – of the Anthropocene. Polycrisis is found operating at the intersection of science and politics where claims to scientific knowledge and political value, and scientific and political judgements, collide. Dealing with the uncertainties of the polycrisis is thus a matter of scientific methodological conundrum and a matter of political judgement and decision. We then propose that the polycrisis research program adopts decision-making under deep uncertainty methods to reach its objectives of improving policy outcomes, but also to better navigate what we call the uncertainty possibility space of the polycrisis.

The polycrisis is a struggle to grapple with the uncertainties of the Anthropocene which demands a new policy approach.

Climate change is significantly altering our planet, with greenhouse gas emissions and environmental changes bringing us closer to critical tipping points. These changes are impacting species and ecosystems worldwide, leading to the urgent need for understanding and mitigating climate change risks. In this study, we examined global research on assessing climate change risks to species and ecosystems. We found that interest in this field has grown rapidly, with researchers identifying key factors such as species' vulnerability, adaptability, and exposure to environmental changes. Our work highlights the importance of developing better tools to predict risks and create effective protect strategies.

The rising concentration of greenhouse gases, coupled with environmental changes such as albedo shifts, is accelerating the approach to critical climate tipping points. These changes have triggered significant biological responses on a global scale, underscoring the urgent need for robust climate change risk assessments for species and ecosystems. We conducted a systematic literature review using the Web of Science database. Our bibliometric analysis shows an exponential growth in publications since 2000, with over 200 papers published annually since 2019. Our bibliometric analysis reveals that the number of studies has exponentially increased since 2000, with over 200 papers published annually since 2019. High-frequency keywords such as ‘impact’, ‘risk’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘response’, ‘adaptation’, and ‘prediction’ were prevalent, highlighting the growing importance of assessing climate change risks. We then identified five universally accepted concepts for assessing the climate change risk on species and ecosystems: exposure, sensitivity, adaptivity, vulnerability, and response. We provided an overview of the principles, applications, advantages, and limitations of climate change risk modeling approaches such as correlative approaches, mechanistic approaches, and hybrid approaches. Finally, we emphasize that the emerging trends of risk assessment of climate change, encompass leveraging the concept of telecoupling, harnessing the potential of geography, and developing early warning mechanisms.

Climate change risks to biodiversity and ecosystem: key insights, modeling approaches, and emerging strategies.

Accelerating global systemic risks impel as well as threaten low-carbon energy transitions. Polycrises can undermine low-carbon transitions, and the breakdown of low-carbon energy transitions has the potential to intensify polycrises. Identifying the systemic risks facing low-carbon transitions is critical, as is studying what systemic risks could be exacerbated by energy transitions. Given the urgency and scale of the required technological and institutional changes, integrated and interdisciplinary approaches are essential to determine how low-carbon transitions can mitigate, rather than amplify polycrisis. If done deliberately and through deliberation, low-carbon transitions could spearhead the integrative tools, methods, and strategies required to address the broader polycrisis.

The urgent need to address accelerating global systemic risks impels low-carbon energy transitions, but these same risks also pose a threat. This briefing discusses factors influencing the stability and resilience of low-carbon energy transitions over extended time-frames, necessitating a multidisciplinary approach. The collapse of these transitions could exacerbate the polycrisis, making it crucial to identify and understand the systemic risks low-carbon transitions face. Key questions addressed include: What are the systemic risks confronting low-carbon transitions? Given the unprecedented urgency and scale of required technological and institutional changes, how can low-carbon transitions mitigate, rather than amplify, global systemic risks? The article describes the role of well-designed climate policies in fostering positive outcomes, achieving political consensus, integrating fiscal and social policies, and managing new risks such as those posed by climate engineering. It emphasizes the importance of long-term strategic planning, interdisciplinary research, and inclusive decision-making. Ultimately, successful low-carbon transitions can provide tools and methods to address broader global challenges, ensuring a sustainable and equitable future amidst a backdrop of complex global interdependencies.

Low-carbon energy transitions must be approached so as to lower the risks of global polycrisis across systems.

Advocates of the concept of polycrisis show that our world faces many interconnected risks that can compound and reinforce each other. Marxist critics, on the contrary, argue that polycrisis advocates have not yet given sufficient attention to the role of capitalism as a root cause of these intersecting crises. This paper agrees with these critics. But I also argue that it is possible to develop an alternative approach to polycrisis analysis rooted in the traditions of Marxism and neo-Gramscian theory. The paper applies this approach to analyze the European Union's ongoing polycrisis and sketch out its possible futures.

Advocates of the term polycrisis often claim that contemporary crises cannot be reduced to a single driver or dominant contradiction, forming instead a complex multiplicity of inter-systemic shocks. Marxist critics, on the contrary, claim that this approach, by framing contemporary crises as disparate and merely contingently connected, obscures the capitalist roots of contemporary crises. I agree with these critics to a point, though I argue that polycrisis thinking is needed to deepen Marxist analyses of the inter-systemic dynamics of contemporary crises and their possible futures. Polycrisis thinking needs Marxism to deepen its analysis of the political economy of polycrisis, whereas Marxism needs polycrisis thinking to enrich its understanding of the political opportunities and constraints that these intersecting crises may create for counter-hegemonic movements. To synthesize the insights of Marxism and polycrisis analysis, I develop an approach rooted in complexity theory and neo-Gramscian political economy. Using the European Union's (EU) ongoing polycrisis as an illustrative example, I show how neo-Gramscian polycrisis analysis can highlight the constraints that neoliberal hegemony places on the EU's efforts to manage its intersecting crises, while also informing counter-hegemonic struggles aiming to navigate toward more desirable futures in Europe's political possibility space.

This paper combines polycrisis thinking and Marxism to analyze the current polycrisis and possible futures of the European Union.

Climate change is one of the most salient issues in current international politics. In all but the most optimistic of scenarios, it has the potential to severely impact human life in many parts of the world. Production and consumption patterns under the current liberal economic order contribute significantly to the climate crisis. Yet the norms and ideas that guide climate policy under this order are remarkably persistent in the face of climate change. This article explores why these norms have not yet been challenged, and how theories of international relations help understand the absence of such challenges.

Multilateral climate policy has institutionalized a set of norms that may be summarized as liberal environmentalism. Liberal environmentalism presumes that economic growth and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive, but prerequisites for each other, thereby connecting the economic order with environmental policy. This article argues that there is a distinct mismatch between the climate crisis and the stickiness of liberal environmentalism. Although the natural system to be governed is in crisis, the political and normative system tasked with governing it is not. The article thus inquires how crises come about by examining why they sometimes do not. It compares theoretical insights borrowed from liberal institutionalism, constructivism, and neo-realism and explores what may be missing from such approaches to fully grasp the nature of crises in international politics. The article finds that liberal environmentalist norms emerged in the 1990s, cascaded in the early 2000s and became institutionalized in the Copenhagen era, culminating in the Paris Agreement. They are likely to remain unaffected by the current polycrisis in international relations, because institutionalized norms are often resistant to change. Liberal environmentalist norms are now deeply embedded in contemporary climate governance, meaning that they can only be challenged through persistent norm entrepreneurship.

Liberal environmentalism persists in global climate policy because of institutionalized norms and the discursive reproduction of these norms.

The polycrisis, an inadvertent peril of our own making, poses an existential threat to the modern world. Given humanity's innate desire to live safely, and to prosper, what explains this self-inflicted danger? Root causes of the polycrisis are both material and ideational. This essay focuses on the latter, exploring the impact of an exaggerated sense of human exceptionalism which legitimizes profligate behavior and releases us from accountability to each other, to the planet, and to future generations.

The polycrisis presents an existential threat to modern civilization on Earth. Neither desirable nor purposeful, it is an inadvertent consequence of collective human agency, a dangerous phenomenon with the power to override prudent, morally sound behavior. Emerging from the totality of multiple global stresses interlinked by myriad causal pathways, the polycrisis is a coherent entity which can, and does, amplify and accelerate local crises (such as supply chain disruptions, political uprisings and war, or natural catastrophes) into a cascading storm of alarming scale and intensity. I argue that these material features of the polycrisis find their origin in and are authorized by an underlying ideational stratum – a belief system – which lends legitimacy and strong forward momentum to the creation of entangled component stresses. This stratum features an exaggerated sense of human exceptionalism, an anthropocentric zeitgeist, and a licentious conception of freedom, all of which have released us from accountability to each other, to ethical forbearance, to future generations, and to the planet.

Multiple entangled stresses threaten our world. This ‘polycrisis’ emerges from the pathology of human exceptionalism.

The design of food systems is a common theme that requires stakeholders to prioritize long-term perspectives and balance between benefits for the present and future generations. Building on this theme, this study aims to demonstrate an intervention in individuals' policy preferences by helping them voluntarily adopt values for long-term policies and assessing its effectiveness through online deliberation experiments involving randomly selected consumers. The findings indicate that interventions incorporating the concept of imaginary future generations significantly influence individuals' food preferences and values.

Food systems are indispensable for the survival of the present generation and simultaneously have various effects on future generations. Therefore, the design of food systems is a typical theme requiring stakeholders to find value in a long-term perspective that achieves an appropriate balance between the benefits for the present and future generations. In this context, this study aims to demonstrate an intervention in individuals' policy preferences by assisting them in voluntarily acquiring values for long-term policies and verifying their effectiveness through online deliberation experiments with randomly selected food consumers (n = 153). The intervention used the future design method and the core concept of imaginary future people. The topic of this experimental study is policies on rice production and consumption in Japan. The findings suggest that interventions that incorporate the concept of imaginary future generations significantly influence individuals' food preferences and values, encouraging a shift toward a sustainable system through fundamental transformation rather than maintaining the current status quo. Based on these results, the authors discuss a pathway toward achieving a sustainable food system, in which collaborative efforts that transcend the individual positions of stakeholders are driven by forming a group identity among individuals willing to adopt the viewpoint of future generations.

The design of food systems is a common theme that requires stakeholders to prioritize long-term perspectives and balance between benefits for the present and future generations. Building on this theme, this study aims to demonstrate an intervention in individuals' policy preferences by helping them voluntarily adopt values for long-term policies and assessing its effectiveness through online deliberation experiments involving randomly selected consumers. The findings indicate that interventions incorporating the concept of imaginary future generations significantly influence individuals' food preferences and values. This concept has the potential to contribute to the realization of a sustainable food system through the establishment of collaborative relationships among various stakeholders.

The term polycrisis refers to simultaneous and interconnected crises that amplify each other's effects. Understanding how crises spread is crucial for understanding how a polycrisis operates. This article explores the conditions under which crises transmit across systems. By examining various theories – from complexity thinking to epidemiology – it discusses to importance of several conducive conditions and system resilience in shaping crisis transmission. The polycrisis concept underscores the need for interdisciplinary approaches to address interconnected global challenges. By identifying how crises spread, policymakers and researchers can better anticipate and mitigate their impacts, fostering resilience in the face of growing systemic risks.

The concept of the polycrisis builds on the assumption that crises are interconnected. This suggests important processes of crisis transmission operate. However, beyond initial modelling we do not know much about how crisis transmission works. For this reason, this article makes a conceptual contribution by presenting a variety of conditions for crisis transmission. It applies an eclectic and inter-disciplinary approach, presenting a diversity of conceptual arguments addressing when and how crises can spread. These include but are not limited to: conceptualizing crisis boundaries and large impact events, neofunctionalism, rational choice theory, assemblage theory, complexity thinking, and epidemiological and evolutionary approaches. Lastly, crisis transmission also depends on the ability to cope with crises and thus resilience plays an important role.

Crisis transmission informs how a polycrisis operates. Discontinuing transmission helps building resilience.

There is significant focus on the global polycrisis currently – and rightfully so, considering the threat to societies around the world that converging environmental, social, political, and economic challenges pose. However, little is said about what comes after the polycrisis. Are there methods to address the polycrisis in ways that would inherently help establish a ‘better’ post-polycrisis period (PPP) (i.e. preserving more of what sustains the many dimensions of human wellbeing while maintaining the integrity of the biosphere and local ecosystems)? This article explores that question, examining potential interventions that could lead to less suffering both during the polycrisis period and PPP.

This article explores how polycrisis interventions can be designed to be the most effective in setting up a better post-polycrisis outcome, while also improving the polycrisis response potential. It starts by setting up a 2 × 2 matrix to explore interventions that (1) improve outcomes during the polycrisis (but not the post-polycrisis period [PPP]), (2) improve outcomes post-polycrisis (but not during the polycrisis); (3) improve neither, and (4) improve both. The article explores some relevant and timely examples in each of the four quadrants, with particular focus on the quadrant in which interventions improve outcomes both for the polycrisis period and PPP. Particular attention is given, within that quadrant, to: reducing nuclear arsenals, population degrowth, economic degrowth, strengthening local agriculture, low-tech and appropriate technologies, and cultivating deeper respect for Gaia. In conclusion, the article recognizes that although it may be difficult, even impossible, to proactively and effectively plan for the PPP, some measures can be taken even now. Further, failing to put this on societal agendas means planning for and addressing long-term wellbeing will only occur by chance, increasing the odds of an extended period of crisis and/or a loss of key knowledge and civilizational advances gained.

Are there interventions to improve human and ecological wellbeing both in the polycrisis and the period that comes after?

Achieving sustainability on the ground poses a challenge in decoding globally defined goals, such as sustainable development goals, and aligning them with local perspectives and realities. This decoding necessitates the understanding of the multifaceted dimensions of the sustainability challenges in a given context, including their underlying causes. In case studies from Brazilian drylands, we illustrate how an enhanced multiscale participatory method, combined with systems thinking tools, can shed light on systemic structures that currently entrench unsustainable development trajectories. This method offers insights into co-designing potential pathways toward sustainable futures and unlocking transformative capacities of the local population.

Translating United Nations global sustainable development goals (SDGs) into actions that address local realities and aspirations is an urgent challenge. It requires new thinking and approaches that foster the discussion about the main challenges to implementing the SDGs at multiple levels. This paper presents a novel multiscale participatory approach that combines the popular Three Horizons diagram with the formalism of causal loop diagrams in systems thinking. We present results from six multi-stakeholder dialogues held across drylands in Brazil with a focus on desired futures aligned with SDGs. Focusing on identifying the root causes and systemic structures of unsustainability, participants identified lock-ins, leverage points, and interventions for how these could be changed. The core lock-ins are the discontinuity of public policies, and the historical land and power concentration reinforced by the current expansion of large-scale agricultural, mining, and energy projects. The proposed interventions are structural and – if implemented – would contribute to achieving SDGs in an integrated manner. The unique approach developed in this study can provide leverage as it bridges the inclusivity of participatory visioning with the change potential of systems thinking tools to tackle root causes and unleash societal transformations.

We are not achieving SDGs. Understanding root causes of unsustainability is critical to move toward sustainable and just futures.