Converging Crises, Cascading Solutions

From Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World by Elizabeth Sawin: Excerpt from Introduction (pages 1-6). Copyright © 2024 Elizabeth Rachel Sawin. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Change, emergencies, even crises, are normal occurrences in our lives.

We build and engage with systems to help us prepare for, and cope with, disruption. As individuals, we insure our homes and cars, learn first aid, and maybe even volunteer for the local fire department. We practice conflict mediation and pay taxes to help support emergency responsiveness. We save money for a rainy day and donate to the local food pantry to help others who have fallen on hard times.

Shouldn’t that be enough?

With regard to future crises, shouldn’t it be enough to do what previous generations have done? Shouldn’t it be enough to take some personal precautions and create institutions to do the rest?

Well, if you’ve reached for this book, then the odds are you suspect that the answer to both questions is no. Are you seeing signs of increasing disruption? Are you witnessing problems cascade, converge, and amplify one another? Are you feeling as though maybe something more is needed in response?

Climate change is powering stronger storms and more intense wildfires. Biodiversity is falling, and the frequency of economic disruptions is quickening.

In many places democracy is weakening, and in others the elite are consolidating wealth. In the face of these mutually reinforcing crises, we need different strategies for coping. The old ones seem to be proving not up to the job.

There is no one-size-fits-all experience of destabilization.

For wealthy North Americans or Europeans, the shocks may feel muffled. For a poor family in the Global South, they may be cataclysmic. But if it feels to you that instability is rising and that the periods of calm between storms are shortening, you are not alone. On a planet with growing ecological crises, the trend is toward more destabilization rather than less.

When I wrote the following words, in notes for what eventually became this book, in mid-2020 in the United States, this is what destabilization looked like from my vantage point:

By the time this book is in your hands the specific symptoms of global and local instability will be different. But if trends continue, one or perhaps both of us may still be navigating some flavor of it.

Not only are we experiencing increased instability, sometimes it seems to be feeding on itself. Notes to myself from early in the pandemic captured how destabilization in one place can ripple out to cause destabilization elsewhere:

And so it goes.

Problems escalate, converge, and cascade. They shape-shift and spread. Here are some of the patterns I’m noticing. You may recognize them, and others, in your own life.

Sometimes, crises arrive faster than we can cope with them. Given enough time, we could manage many of the types of crises we are currently facing. But when they arrive too fast or in dangerous combinations, they overwhelm our ability to cope.

In 2020 for instance, the city of Lake Charles, Louisiana, had yet to recover from Hurricane Laura when Hurricane Delta struck. Houses whose roofs were still covered with blue tarps from Laura’s impact were even more vulnerable when Delta arrived. The radar system, damaged by Laura, was not working optimally to give people information about Delta’s approach. That’s what happens when crises arise faster than the speed of recovery.

In addition to the same types of crises following one after the next with increasing frequency, communities or businesses may also experience several different types of crises at close to the same time.

When crises are slow and sporadic, responding to several types of crises using the same coping capacity can work. It is efficient, in fact. But what happens when the same emergency response department has multiple overlapping crises to deal with?

As the 2020 hurricane season began in North America, I was on a conference call with officials worried about the hurricane readiness of a major US city. The city had depleted its emergency response budget trying to manage COVID-19. As a result, the whole city stood vulnerable at the beginning of hurricane season. One crisis had depleted its capacity to cope with other potential crises.

Some crises feed on themselves; others erode our ability to cope. 

Viral pandemics—including COVID-19, of course—are classic examples of crises that feed on themselves. All else being equal, the more people who are infected in a community, the more people are exposed, leading to a rising tide of infections, sometimes with devastating results for health systems and for human well-being.

Even if a crisis doesn’t feed on itself, it can cause enough damage that it becomes harder to respond to the next crisis.

When a house is burned out by wildfire and not rebuilt, that’s one fewer property taxpayer in a community. It’s also a smaller budget with which to respond to future fires. If a business lays off workers when supply chain issues disrupt the production schedule, it will take longer to fix mechanical problems that crop up on the production line because the most knowledgeable workers won’t be on the floor. Countries that have spent heavily to cope with the pandemic have fewer resources to invest in climate change adaptation. Each of these is an example of one crisis depleting the ability to respond to others.

Solutions to one problem can make others worse. 

In 2018 sparks from electric transmission lines in California led to climate change–exacerbated fires that burned thousands of acres of land and destroyed homes and businesses. In response, for the following fire season, one electric utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), instituted power shutoffs. The shutoffs may have prevented some fires, but they also caused small businesses to lose revenue. And people who lost the contents of their refrigerators and freezers were put at risk of food insecurity. The way the utility addressed the fire problem contributed to new problems.

Vernice Miller-Travis, an environmental justice leader in the United States, wrote in 2020 about the “synergistic epidemic” of COVID-19 and environ- mental injustice, another example of complex, interacting, mutually exacerbating problems:

Failure to address one crisis diminishes gains made on others. 

In an interconnected world with long, interacting chains of cause and effect, sometimes the efforts to solve a problem in one sector are successful, only for some other neglected problem to feed back around and erode the initial progress.

For instance, let’s say that new housing is designed to be energy efficient. Terrific! This will allow the residents to save more of their paycheck for other expenses, like food, education, and medicine. But if the city where the new housing sits hasn’t mustered a strong climate change adaptation program, the combination of urban heat island effect and longer and more frequent periods of extreme heat might create a stronger need for air-conditioning in the summer. Energy bills go back up, and residents’ savings go down.

And so on. When problems interconnect, focusing on them one at a time can result in unanticipated and sometimes devastating backlashes.

Crises grow in size and scale because vested interests resist change.

Some problems, whose consequences are extremely dangerous, have well-documented solutions that are waiting to be implemented. Biodiversity loss and climate change come to mind. For crises like these, the scientific consensus is strong.

However, a few powerful interests stand to lose a lot if action to solve the problem is taken, and so they deny the problem and prevent the strong response that is needed. There is a mismatch in power between those working for change and those who resist it, and that delays the response to the crisis.

When you look at these patterns of crises and responses, though they occur at various scales, in a range of geographies, and concern different issues, what do you see?

I see problems that are not yielding to the standard ways we have been approaching them.

I see problems that are interconnected and solutions that are too often siloed.

I see short- and long-term components being addressed with solutions that focus on only one timescale.

I see problems that span silos and people working within silos trying to solve them.

And when I talk to the people who are trying to address these problems, I hear frustration, exhaustion, fear, and demoralization.

I see, more than anything, problems that cry out for different approaches.

The good news is people are experimenting with different approaches around the world, designing weblike solutions for weblike problems. The very good news is that we can all learn from these experiments and add to them.

It’s not too late to start. But there’s also not a moment to lose.