Towards a theory of coupled sociopolitical events-planetary boundaries, crises, policrisis and Earth System syndromes

Orfeu Bertolami; Ricardo Elísio

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arXiv · 2507.16423

Towards a theory of coupled sociopolitical events-planetary boundaries, crises, policrisis and Earth System syndromes

Orfeu Bertolami·Ricardo Elísio

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Abstract

The impact of the human activities can be evaluated by the Planetary Boundaries (PBs), however, so far it is not clear how to assess the influence of specific sociopolitical events (SPEs) on the Earth System (ES) and at the same measure, without a suitable framework, to gauge how these affect the PBs. In this work, we propose an interacting matrix model that couples SPEs with the PBs and consider the possible evolution scenarios and, in particular, those leading to crises and policrisis. We address specifically the situation where the PBs evolve according to the continuous logistic function, and then consider an exponentially-evolving SPE, which we show to cause a runaway effect on the PBs. We also propose a way to describe, classify, and compare sociopolitical syndromes, that is, a set composed of more than a single polycrisis.

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Orfeu Bertolami, Ricardo Elísio. 2025-07-22. Towards a theory of coupled sociopolitical events-planetary boundaries, crises, policrisis and Earth System syndromes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16423

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