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Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Most people are waiting for the next major crisis. What they don't realize is that it's already happening. It's not just one event. It's a number of crises unfolding at once. The term analysts call, what we're going through right now is polycrisis. And so all polycrisis is. Is when multiple major global crises unfold at the same time and begin inter with one another, amplifying the damage far beyond what any one crisis would cause on its own. So think of it this way. Usually the global system has one massive shock. If we're talking about a crisis, the financial collapse, a war, a massive food shortage. Now, today, our global system is experiencing all of these elements at one time, and then they are basically employees floating with each other because the global economy has become so interconnected that it's almost impossible to separate it out from a crisis, even if it's all the way over in Africa. So the danger is not simply the crises themselves. It's how it triggers these cascading effects when they interact with one another. So let's just clearly define a polycrisis. And the easiest way to start is to use kind of the global food system, especially because it's under pressure, you know, with all of this that is going on. So right now, 735 million people worldwide are undernourished. Then we have another 300 million people in 50 countries who face acute food insecurity. So those numbers have stopped, steadily increased over the last couple years. And of course, the driver is conflict and instability. Now, war, as we all know, disrupts the food system in a number of ways. First off, if it's dangerous, the farmers aren't even going to plant, let alone harvest. Then irrigation systems, agricultural infrastructure gets damaged. We have transportation networks that completely, completely collapse. And then we have markets, of course, that stop functioning because there's no goods brought to them. Modern agriculture is also highly dependent on the global supply chain. We're talking about fertilizer, energy, shipping, and then grain exports. All of those elements are interconnected. So before the war in Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine, you know, were about what, 30% of the worldwide grain exports? And they had a large percentage of the worldwide fertilizer market. Of course, both those got impacted. You know, grain prices soared and fertilizer went up. What was it, Three times the cost. Now, today, we're having some of the same impacts with fertilizer because a large percentage came through the Strait of Hormuz. So farmers are experiencing some of these same problems. So when fertilizer becomes too expensive or you can't even get your hands on it, farmers reduce how much they use. And then of course, crop yields are smaller. And in a developing country, you know, if you lose 10, 15, 20% of your crops, it puts you in a really bad place. The food system is kind of at this global intersection where all these pressures come together. And when several shocks to the system happen, the entire system becomes incredibly fragile. This episode is brought to you by Dose for Cholesterol. One of the things we've been talking about more lately is how people are starting to pay closer attention to to the habits they build into their daily routine, especially when it comes to things like cholesterol support. The reality is a lot of people hesitate when they're told they might have to start taking something long term that they're not completely comfortable with. People feel like they wanna have still some say over how to manage their own health and what they're putting into their body. 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So it's easy for people to work into their routine to support cholesterol habits. And it gets delivered right to your door, which makes it so much easier to stay consistent. New Customers can save 35% on their first month subscription at DailyDose Co Watchfloor or by using Watchfloor at checkout. Again, that's DailyDose Co Watchfloor for 35% off your first month subscription. Now let's go to a country and let's talk about how it's a real world example of a polycrisis. The best example right now is, of course, Sudan. So Sudan has a number of crises going on simultaneously. They have civil war, they have economic collapse, they have mass displacement, they have food shortages, and then they literally have a collapsing health care system. I mean, think of all this at once. And since fighting erupted in 2023 against the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces, all of this has worsened dramatically. So Today there are 8 million people displaced inside Sudan, and then there are 18 million people facing severe food insecurity. So large agricultural regions in Sudan are basically completely empty because the farmers had to flee or they'd be killed. We also had markets collapse in several cities because they couldn't bring the goods in. Right. The farms weren't delivering anything. And then we have. Even if you talk about aid organizations, they have a hard time getting to some of these communities because of the security situation. So in Sudan, the crisis isn't just one problem. You know, war drove economic collapse, economic collapse drove hunger, and then the hunger has driven this massive displacement. Right. Each crisis fuels another, and that's where we get this term, like polycrisis. Another great example of these cascading crises is in Haiti. We sometimes forget to talk about it. It'll flash up on the news every few months. But we don't know that there's this ongoing problem, problem occurring. The country has been politically fragile, and the situation has deteriorated sharply since the assassination of Zovina Moes in 2021. So the government, for example, like, struggles to maintain control. There's armed gangs that control about 80 to 90% of the capital of Port au Prince. We had foreign troops come in, you know, with the support of the UN Just helping the situation. And now we've learned that they were committing rapes. And now another force is coming in, but it's going to be half the numbers. We have prison breaks occurring all the time with criminals being released. Major infrastructure such as the ports, the hospitals, and the roads are repeatedly shut down because of all these, like, violent conflicts that just spring out of nowhere. And the consequences then is, you can imagine, ripple outward. We have more than 5 million Haitians who are experiencing food insecurity. You know, hospitals are struggling to operate. And then large numbers of people are, of course, attempting to leave the country. And the security collapse, as you can imagine, quickly becomes economic collapse, and then that becomes a humanitarian crisis. You know, one of the most visible kind of outcomes or consequences of a poly crisis is, is usually mass migration. Because by the time that happened a lot of things compounded on top of each other to make it happen. Today there are more than 117 million people who have been forcibly displaced. And this is the highest number actually ever recorded. You know, people are moving and being forced out of their homes for a number of issues, of course. War, terrorism, economic collapse, criminal violence, food shortages that we've talked about. And then these migration flows become their own humanitarian crises. And then wherever they end up going, it literally turns into political crises in those countries. Remember when the war in Syria, their internal civil war, really got going, and ISIS was having lots of successes in 2015, there was mass immigration. In one year, 1 million people came. We just found out last week in Germany, over the course of the whole war, they took in themselves one country, one million Syrians. I mean, this has massive impacts, you know, that we don't really talk about, but we need to, because it cascades into other issues. These large migration waves, of course, affect a number of systems. First, of course, the border system. Right? We saw that in our own country. When everyone came over the southern border during the Biden administration, it was to where they just put their hands up. They couldn't vet anyone. They weren't taking their photos. There is no documentation going on. And then you have problems within the housing market. If you have too many people come in, you don't have enough housing, right? You got to build more housing. You got to use government dollars to subsidize the housing. And then there's other public services involved. Of course, people might not even know the language. We don't know their skill sets. They might need to be on some snap benefits. They have a large number of children, et cetera, et cetera. All of these issues compound, and they really do spread instability across regions. A conflict or an economic collapse in one country really can reshape politics in another. We have seen it ourselves with this. Over 14, 15 million unknown people coming across our border now, causing effects that are going to take 10, 20 years to course correct. Another pressure point in a poly crisis involves global trade routes. Of course, our modern economies depend on, on this massive, complex shipping network that expands the entire globe. Well, one of the most important routes, as we know, is through the Suez Canal in the red Sea. And 12% of global trade passes through this region. And we had these recent attacks there by the Houthis. You know, when they chose to get involved in the conflict that we had, you know, to do with Gaza, it caused massive disruptions. So instead of traveling through the canal, a lot of Ships had to go through the Cape of Good Hope. If you don't know that adds another 10 to 14 travel days. And as you can imagine, a lot more costs. Those costs then get rolled into the price of the goods, the price of the energy, what you're paying for these different food commodities. These are not isolated incidents. There's an ongoing campaign even by our adversaries to target global shipping. It's forcing this long term recalculation of routes and it's not just temporary rerouting. You can imagine a lot of discussion as to, hey, maybe we have to invest in opening up trade routes in safer regions. Well, that's a lot of money and it's going to be a huge undertaking. But these regional conflicts are almost forcing this because it is disrupting the world economy and it affects everyone, you know, no matter whose borders you're in. And of course, when we talk about the effects of global shipping, we have to talk about this escalation we have with Iran. Obviously there's a lot of pressures coming out of this military operation and the long term consequences are of course still unfolding. We don't know how long the conflict's going to last. All the pieces of a global economy it's going to affect, but the Persian Gulf is of course a critical artery for the world's energy. And then as we've all heard in the last couple of weeks, you know, 20% of the world's oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz. So with that being closed, you know, those disruptions have affected oil prices, a number of shipping routes, inflation, economic growth, you know, in a lot of countries and you know, it's impacted Europe, you know, tremendously. So even before the final outcome is known with Iran, the escalation there adds another potential shock to the system, another crisis that then stresses everything when we're already inside this massive poly crisis. Another emerging pressure that comes out of a poly crisis is this growing sovereign debt issue. And it's occurring mostly in the developing world. So you don't hear about it a lot. Countries had to borrow a lot of money during the COVID crisis just to like stabilize their economies. Was, you can imagine with growing interest rates, they can't afford to pay back their debts. So we have, you know, more than 50 developing countries are at this like risk due to their high debts. And that includes Sri Lanka, Zambia, Ghana, and they're now facing, as you can imagine, like civil severe debt crisis. And they're not exactly sure how they're going to get out of it, right, because things aren't really getting better with multiple crisises that keep coming up. A lot of people really never were able to recover after Covid and we forget about that here. But you know, in these developing countries it was so much more of an impact. So when governments can no longer service their debt, they have to cut money on different things like subsidies for food, public services, infrastructure. That can trigger, as you can imagine, political unrest, right? Why is our government doing nothing for us? Economic collapse. And then of course, migration pressures. If I can't get the food I need, if we can't keep the power on, if my 20 year old is never going to get a good job here, right, they're not going to stay. We're going to have to move on. So this debt crisis is a lot bigger issue, I think than a lot of people understand. And then they're discussing another emerging concern or vulnerability we need to talk about is the vulnerability of critical infrastructure. When a number of crises are going on, right, we have things that are just like cyber attacks, right? Iran is threatening them in this environment. We have other bad actors like North Korea, et cetera, and they target energy, transportation, our financial systems. We did a whole episode on North Korea targeting things like our financial system. And in a poly crisis, these disruptors or these bad actors or even terrorists will amplify existing instability very quickly and for their own gains. And it's kind of one of those things, right, when you're at a weak moment, right, Everything's going to come at you. We all know this in life, when something bad happens, it's like three more bad things happen. And so when a system already in shock gets then hit with a number of different issues simultaneously, right, the effects multiply and it's just harder to gain traction in anything because there's so many problems going on. This is really one of those issues we have with our southern border. It's such a big problem that if you just pick one piece to work on, it's like you're hardly making effects. You have to have almost like this whole of government massive approach to the problem, which is of course also difficult to do because of overreach and all the other problems involved, legal, etc. So there are three indicators a lot of analysts are looking at right now when we're talking through this poly crisis. So you know, I want you to keep this in the back of your mind. First is oil prices and shipping through the shred of Hormuz and then any disruptions, right, that could spike energy prices higher so not just in the straight, but could something else happen somewhere else in the energy ecosystem to exasperate this second is global food prices, particularly wheat and fertilizer. The food prices have been already spiking historically and this can make it much worse. Another thing is this sovereign debt problem. Again, it is in developing countries, but these wave of defaults can trigger so much instability across the region that can support terrorism. It supports this mass displacement of people, it can push more illegal immigrants to move towards the United States. It's constantly causing crisis when you're still not solving the previous crisis. So it's almost like we need some breathing room. So the world is not facing one crisis. The world is facing many crises that are clearly with one another. And it's war, it's economic instability, it's migration pressures, it's fragile governments, it's disrupted trade routes and it's food insecurity. And they're all like kind of crashing into each other. And the real danger then isn't just one single event. It's that moment when the crisis start amplifying one another because that increase in collision is where it's very hard to have quick and immediate and lasting effects against it. Now you have this shock to the system that's going to take a long period of time to correct. The most dangerous moment isn't the crisis you see coming. It's what hits you when everything else is already strained. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.