The writer is a former senior vice-president at the World Bank
When the Titanic set sail in 1912, it was considered unsinkable because the hull was constructed as 16 watertight compartments. The ship would reportedly still float if up to four of these compartments were damaged. A similar assumption underpins today’s international financial architecture in the face of a polycrisis: runaway climate change, financial faultlines, the health pandemic, geopolitical dangers, the next generation of artificial intelligence and global water and food shortages.
International leadership seems to think that if two or more crises flare up simultaneously, the system will still float. This assumption is patently wrong. The interplay of the climate crisis with financial fragility alone threatens potentially insurmountable dangers unless immediate action is taken.