Polycrisis Resilience: A General Definition and the H Heuristics Framework

Polycrisis Resilience: A General Definition and the H Heuristics Framework introduces Polycrisis Resilience as a general concept for understanding and strengthening resilience in an era of interacting and compounding crises. The report defines Polycrisis Resilience as the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, economies, societies, and interconnected systems to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, recover from, and reduce their vulnerability to multiple interacting crises. It argues that contemporary risks increasingly emerge through causal entanglement across climate, environmental, economic, geopolitical, demographic, health, technological, and infrastructure domains, making conventional single-hazard approaches insufficient. The report develops a framework built around six capacities: risk reduction, preventive, absorptive, recovery, adaptive, and transformative capacity. It emphasizes that resilience should not be understood solely as the ability to recover from shocks, but also as the ability to reduce vulnerability before crises occur and to emerge from disruptions less exposed to future risks. Resilience is treated as a multi-scale property distributed across households, communities, institutions, economies, societies, and interconnected systems.The second part of the report presents the H Heuristics Polycrisis Resilience Framework, which views development as a primary mechanism for reducing vulnerability. The framework proposes that convergence, technology diffusion, sustainable development, and coordinated improvement across economic, technological and infrastructure, environmental, human, and institutional systems can strengthen resilience over the long term. Through a five-stage development cycle of vulnerability assessment, intervention prioritization, system strengthening, vulnerability reduction, and continuous improvement, the framework seeks to build resilience by addressing underlying development deficits rather than relying on crisis response alone. Drawing on evidence from disaster risk reduction, development economics, and resilience research, the report argues that improvements in income, education, health, infrastructure, institutions, and technology have historically reduced vulnerability to a wide range of shocks. It concludes that the most effective resilience strategies are those that generate multiple benefits across systems, reduce several vulnerabilities simultaneously, and leave societies progressively better prepared for future interconnected crises.