Living in the era of the polycrisis: 17 ways human civilisation can come crashing down in 75 years

The report, titled The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Health, seeks to provide early warning of emerging catastrophes by viewing them through the prism of public health. Of the 17, the most prominent ones are nuclear war, climate change and the abuse of AI. In its “Pyramid of Threats”, nuclear war and AI are classified as threats that can cause human extinction. Climate Change is ranked just under this as a threat that can cause major catastrophes.

The report terms these threats as DALYs (disability-adjusted life-years), a metric of health outcomes defined as the difference between a plausible best- and worst-case scenario for each event. The higher this figure is, the worse the threat. While nuclear war and AI score high DALYs of 9.35 billion and 10.4 billion, respectively, climate change has a DALY of 1.89 billion. For comparison, the DALY figure for Covid-19 was 500 million.

The report states that the main health threat from climate impacts in South Asia will come from increased heat, floods, and tropical storms, and will reduce overall life expectancy by up to 2.8 years in some areas.

El Niño’s impact on children

In the previous edition of this newsletter, Sayantan wrote about how the El Niño—the warm phase of a planetary, multi-year, natural climate pattern—will probably cause 451,000 excess heat deaths worldwide by next summer. Now, a press note from Unicef states that more than 347 million children are at risk of harm due to the impacts of the El Niño. The report states that over 347 million children will suffer specifically due to excessive wet or dry conditions between October and December of this year.

Of this number, the largest number of children affected (190 million) is from Asia and the Pacific. It also states that globally, 1.1 billion children (nearly half of all children worldwide) were already exposed to at least three overlapping climate hazards, such as drought, extreme heat, and floods, and that the current El Niño is going to make these impacts even more severe.

World facing a food security crisis

A new report from the research group Zero Carbon Analytics states that a combination of the El Niño phenomenon and the US war against Iran is threatening global food security. The report comes with an interactive global map that tracks previous instances of climate impacts—from 2022 and 2024, two of the hottest years on record—that are pushing up food inflation. The authors of the report use this as a model to predict what the current situation holds for major agricultural regions worldwide.

According to past trends, the current level of heating worldwide due to climate change and El Niño, South Asia, along with Europe and the US, will see the greatest increase in compounding crop failures, leading to a spike in food inflation. In fact, we can already see the effect in India, with retail inflation climbing to 5.54% in September, driven mainly by a rise in food prices.

Climate Obstruction

The 2026-2027 edition of the annual 10 New Insights in Climate Science report has one very interesting point. This states that organized obstruction of global decarbonization over the past decades has led to the planet being on the verge of overshooting the safety limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

Political pressure, climate denial, delay and disinformation tactics from major fossil fuel companies and petro states are to blame for this. The report makes the point that by intentionally obstructing the global transition from costly, wasteful fossil fuels to cheap and efficient renewable energy, the world is currently in a much worse place than it would’ve been.

Going forward, the report urges the UNFCCC (the UN grouping of nations leading the fight against climate change) to establish strict conflict-of-interest reforms to prevent fossil fuel industry-related individuals and entities from delaying negotiations. It should be noted that the term “fossil fuels” as the cause of global heating was included in an UNFCCC resolution only in 2021, during COP26. And it was only two years after that, during COP28, that a resolution to transition away from all fossil fuels was first adopted, despite major pushback from petro states like Saudi Arabia.

Digger

The Tom Cruise-starring film by director Alejandro González Iñárritu may have flopped in theatres. But that shouldn’t stop us from appreciating a truly entertaining and thought-provoking black comedy on the climate and environmental disasters caused by rapacious corporate greed.

A satire that is also a meta-narrative on satire, the film uses its structure to brilliantly show up the self-serving greed and idiocy of the fossil fuel establishment, much as Stanley Kubrick did with Dr Strangelove to comment on the Cold War. Everyone is raving about one particular scene in which Tom Cruise’s oil magnate Digger Rockwell lampoons the fossil fuel addiction of the establishment, and it is a fantastic scene indeed, encapsulating all that is wrong with the current burn-and-run economy.

And that’s it from me this week. Sayantan will be back in a fortnight with the next edition of Climate Change & You.

Bibek Bhattacharya

Bibek Bhattacharya is a National Editor at Mint, serving as the Deputy Editor for Mint Lounge. Bibek’s area of expertise is climate change, with a focus on climate science and the impacts of the climate crisis on South Asia. He has been a journalist for 22 years, in which time he has worked in newsrooms at NDTV, Business Today and Outlook, covering politics, business and lifestyle. He has been with Mint for eight years and writes on climate, culture and history, and over the years, he has received several journalism awards for his stories, including the Red Ink. For Mint, Bibek has been writing the well-known "Climate Change Tracker" column for seven years, and for the past two years, he has been writing the popular newsletter "Climate Change & You". He is also the host of the award-winning "Mint Climate Change Tracker" podcast. His book on climate change—"Our Beautiful World”—was awarded Publishing Next’s 'Children Book of the Year' prize in 2023. Away from work, Bibek is an avid hiker and a musician. When in doubt, he re-reads “The Lord of the Rings”.