Disruption is needed to confront the global polycrisis threatening all species’ health

The word polycrisis refers to multiple, interconnected crises that occur simultaneously or in close succession, amplifying each other’s effects and making them more difficult to manage or resolve (1). Most of the world’s debates and literature about the current global polycrisis focuses on implications for humanity. However, impacts on humanity will be funneled, in large part, through severe consequences on animal health and survival. The challenge facing the animal health community is how to be prepared to adapt to upcoming consequences that will limit wild and domestic animals’ abilities to thrive in an uncertain future.

The word polycrisis was not created to serve as a catchall to describe the growing number of existential threats all species face such as climate change, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, pandemics, changes in governance norms, growing pollution threats, the misinformation epidemic, failure of multilateralism, and more. Rather, it calls attention to how individual crises that make up a polycrisis interact and affect each other, intensifying their individual impacts and giving rise to new collective threats. Attacking each crisis in isolation is no longer sufficient, because today’s crises cannot be fully understood or addressed in isolation from one another (1). Business as usual based on past concepts of success and progress is no longer a viable pathway to sustaining health.

I propose that 5 factors are driving the urgency to disrupt how we do what we do. First, social and environmental changes are happening at unprecedented temporal and geographic scales. Although root causes of these threats may have taken decades or even centuries to manifest, the rate of occurrence of problems and emergence of new problems is faster than our usual political and research cycles can cope. Second, the world is more connected than we realize or than it was before. Problems that threaten the future health of all living things are interconnected, as are their solutions. Yet, we still tend to break problems and solutions into more easily managed pieces. A “science of the whole” or “global root cause medicine” is still wanting. Third, capacity is shrinking. Human capacity to confront the polycrisis is rapidly declining due to the gray wave of retirement of baby boomers and people leaving the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even more importantly, natural capital is shrinking at alarming rates. The health of everything depends on healthy, functioning ecosystems. But the conversion of natural places for urbanization and agriculture, changes in landscape due to climate change, and biodiversity loss from a myriad of human-induced factors is rapidly causing the world to surpass planetary boundaries within which we must exist to survive (2). Fourth, it is becoming an increasingly confusing world. Never have we had access to more information than we do today. However, constant access to conflicting, false, and diverse information and values makes it hard to find pathways forward. This gets even more problematic when trying to understand intertwined and interdependent problems, in which how you see a problem is strongly influenced by how you look at it. One’s disciplinary framing of a problem affects one’s openness to new ways of knowing and doing. Given that we value specialists in training and practice, our ability to see things in holistic ways becomes limited because, even if a specialist uses everything they know, their perspective will always be limited by their specialty. Fifth, we remain overconfident that tomorrow is going to be like yesterday and, therefore, business as usual will work to fix problems in a world vastly different than the past.

These 5 drivers are compounded by the tendency to recognize a new potentially catastrophic threat, react to it for a few years, and then move on (3). Societies’ recall of recent events vanishes, and we forget/ignore how we got there. This leads us to not sustain attention and investment in the “inter-apocalypse stage” to address circumstances that gave rise to the current threat. As a result, we fail to build resilience against the next inevitable shock. More investment is made in looking at problems in greater detail and finding risks rather than protecting assets that keep us and animals well. Knowledge about threats and risk factors alone will not lead to risk reduction without understanding factors that can change the trajectory of a socio-ecological system to a safer state. The current research paradigms still largely reduce our messy intertwined polycrisis into a set of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, yet distinct, problems.

DISRUPTION AS A FUTURE-READY STRATEGY

A critical question for educators is, “are we equipping the next generation to deal with an uncertain, volatile, complex, and ambiguous future?” Do our training and capacity development efforts prepare people for a world that is disappearing rather than for the world that is coming?

Integrating traditionally distinct knowledge, skills, and perspectives for disruptive purposes is a growing expectation of universities, businesses, and governments (4). Disruptive thinking challenges conventional ways of thinking to create new solutions and innovations. Disruption comes from introducing new ideas and approaches, asking fundamental questions that break the status quo, and pushing inquiry in new directions (5). Disruption won’t occur if we drive innovation through old ways of knowing and doing that emphasize mastery of facts and skills (6).

The next generation must be able to do 4 things if we want to disrupt the current approach to our shared problems (7–9). First, is the ability to recognize the interdependence of human and non-human systems in health protection, sustainable development, and conservation. Second, the capacity to conceive of and implement multifaceted approaches to address connected problems from several perspectives for faster, more effective, acceptable and sustainable impacts. Third is willingness to integrate several ways of knowing through cross-sectoral learning that shares ideas, innovations, information, resources, and expertise. Fourth, is the expansion from problem- or disease-specific solutions to comprehensive or system-level solutions.

To empower people to master these 4 skills, education and training must encourage learners to look at problems and solutions in new ways by linking knowledge across fields and critically thinking about strategies that create benefits by applying new ways of thinking. Training must encourage learners to be curious and take chances. Using what they know in new situations and incorporating what others know into what they do should is a foundational skill for disruptors. Helping trainees to try new ideas, adapt and learn is critical for effective health processionals in a rapidly changing world. Finally, the next generation must be adept at translating what they know to those who need to know in ways they can use what is known.

Our training systems need to empower people to be disruptors. Their purpose is to challenge the status quo to increase our collective ability to:

1. anticipate ripples of consequences of today’s actions on diverse species and situations;

2. incorporate future implications into present-day decision-making;

3. help people and ideas come together to understand what choices need to be made and what information is needed to make decisions; and

4. generate feasible, effective and acceptable options to mitigate effects of the polycrisis.

A disruptive agenda needs to move beyond discovering what works and why, to understanding what works for whom and under what circumstances.

SUMMARY

Being more resilient in a polycrisis necessitates preserving and protecting root causes of health. This is well known. However, our attention and investments into making this a reality are dwarfed by the magnitude of the challenges ahead for all species. Without transformation to collectively address root causes of health and resilience, we will continue to battle new crises as they emerge. Unfortunately, new information is often incorporated into previously constructed and accepted narratives to create certainty. Competitive pressure can encourage attention on predictable and readily publishable results rather than findings that are disruptive (10). Although this approach cements the legitimacy of the status quo, it counteracts development of a new ways of thinking and doing (11).

Defining a successful strategy for the future through a mechanistic, biomedical framework or in economic terms rather than considering a broader social and ecological context will perpetuate the imbalance in how we prepare the next generation. Diverse situations, scales, epistemologies, values, and specialities that exist throughout a polycrisis make it exceedingly hard to answer the questions of “what is the right path forward?” Determining what to do can be extremely challenging when a problem is influenced by multiple, changing components with numerous independent and interdependent interactions acting across blurry boundaries.

To address the volatility and systems brittleness that the polycrisis is causing, we must redouble our efforts to maintain foundational social and ecological determinants of health for animals to be resilient and healthy. We must identify ways to work with others to uncover shared solutions to diverse problems by addressing root causes and not just symptoms. To cope with growing uncertainty and infodemics affecting ability to make health-promoting decisions, we need to expand out concepts of evidence-based decision support by incorporating different ways of knowing into our research and practice. Embracing multiple values and truths as we try to mobilize our evidence will help us accelerate movement of knowledge into action.

In the face of the existential challenges ahead, it is important to take the time to reflect on how we choose priorities across a vast array of problems, values, and needs. It is naïve to assume that human, animal, and environmental health efforts have equal power, profile, resources, or capacity, or that they are treated equitably. Regardless, as a profession dedicated to speaking for animal health, it is incumbent upon us ask if what we are doing is aligned with what this and future generations of animals need to survive and thrive in this polycrisis era.