The Anthropocene Traps

For most of human history, our crises came one at a time. A drought, a war, a plague — each was terrible, but each had a beginning and an end, and societies could marshal a response. In the 21st century, that has changed. We now live inside a tangle of crises that fuel each other: climate change worsens harvests, which worsens hunger, which worsens migration, which worsens political polarisation, which paralyses the climate response. The whole thing is a knot, and pulling on any single thread tightens the others.

Researchers have started to call this the polycrisis — a condition in which the world's major problems have become so interlocked that they can no longer be understood, let alone solved, in isolation. In 2023, an international team of researchers led by Peter Søgaard Jørgensen at the Stockholm Resilience Centre published a paper that asked a sharper version of the question: is the polycrisis a temporary mess, or have we accidentally locked ourselves into it?

Their answer borrows a concept from evolutionary biology — the trap. A trap, in this sense, is not a conspiracy or a moral failing. It is what happens when a behaviour that was once adaptive — a clever solution to a real problem — turns maladaptive at a new scale, but stays locked in because the systems around it have come to depend on it. Seabirds eating microplastics they mistake for plankton. People reaching for sugar because their ancestors evolved in environments where sugar was rare and precious. Whole civilisations doubling down on fossil fuels long after the costs have become obvious.

The paper identifies 14 such traps operating at the planetary scale — not metaphors, but specific, named, measurable patterns with growing evidence behind them. 12 of the 14 are already in advanced phases. 93% of the pairwise interactions between them are amplifying, not dampening: the traps are mostly making each other worse.

This page is a reference to that framework. It explains how the traps form, how to recognise the one you are inside, what the indicators show, and — crucially — what evolutionary biologists and resilience researchers think a way out might look like.

Every Anthropocene trap follows the same 4-phase arc. It begins with a useful innovation, scales up as the world becomes dependent on it, hides its growing costs behind distance and complexity, and finally clicks shut as 1 of 5 trapping mechanisms makes the trajectory exceedingly hard to reverse.

The 5 trapping mechanisms repay a moment of attention, because they are what makes an ordinary crisis into a trap:

• Constraints. The system has lost the variety it would need to adapt. Lean, optimised supply chains snap under shocks they could once have absorbed.
• Conflict. Actors are pulled toward incompatible local optima and can no longer cooperate to leave them — selfish states, selfish corporations, deadlocked negotiations.
• Tipping points. A threshold is crossed that triggers cascading, self-amplifying change — and returning to the previous state requires a much larger reversal than the crossing did.
• Permanence. The technology, knowledge or material persists. Nuclear weapons, once invented, cannot be uninvented. Long-lived chemicals stay in soils for centuries.
• Scale mismatch. Local action no longer matches global consequence. A city composting its waste does not undo the global appetite that overheats the planet.

The 14 traps are not a flat list. They cluster into 3 families, each driven by a different underlying loop in human cultural evolution. Knowing the family helps you see why a particular trap is so hard to escape.

The traps do not sit in 14 separate boxes; they push and pull on each other. The source paper assessed all 182 possible pairwise interactions, finding that 87 are non-neutral — and of those, 93% are amplifying (one trap making another worse) while only 7% are dampening.

4 traps stand out as hubs — they amplify many others and tend to show up wherever the polycrisis is most acute: Division, Short-termism, Overconsumption, and Technological Autonomy. Addressing any one of them would weaken multiple downstream traps.

A trap is only a trap until something pushes back. The uncomfortable question is whether the things societies already know how to do — coping through change, deliberately transforming themselves — are up to the job of navigating the polycrisis we're already inside.

Take the 23 capacities that resilience research has identified — 14 for adapting, 9 for transforming — and ask, for each of the 14 traps, whether the capacity helps, whether the trap weakens it, or both. Of the 322 possible interactions, 72 turn out to be real. They fall into four kinds, and the balance between those four is the story of this section.

Here is the part of the story that is genuinely hopeful: we are not starting from zero. Resilience research has spent two decades watching how communities, institutions and whole societies absorb shocks, rebuild, and sometimes deliberately remake themselves. From that work, twenty-three capabilities stand out clearly enough to be named and built on. None of them require a new technology or a single heroic actor — they are habits of organising ourselves that already exist somewhere, in some form, and can be grown.

They split into two complementary kinds. Adaptive capacities are the everyday work of staying upright through change — keeping options open, learning as you go, remembering what worked last time, expecting surprises. Transformative capacities are different in kind: they are how a society decides the current path itself is the problem and steers onto a new one — naming what is broken, imagining alternatives, backing the ones with promise, scaling what works, and locking the new pattern into law, infrastructure and habit.

The good news is that these two kinds cover each other's blind spots. Transformative capacities do most of the work against the big global and technology traps, where the answer is to change the system itself. Adaptive capacities hold the line against the temporal and structural traps — short-termism, biosphere disconnect, the quiet erosion of local social ties — where the pace and reach of modern life have simply outrun our ability to keep up. Neither set alone is enough. Together, they are a serious toolkit.

Each card below names one capacity in plain language, with the original research term kept underneath for traceability. The small markers on the right say how many of the 14 traps this capacity pushes back on (teal), how many it is locked in a two-way struggle with (purple), and how many can erode it if it is not actively defended (red).

What happens if you take all 14 traps, all 23 capacities, and ask — for every single pair — whether one is pushing on the other? You get a map of where our defences exist, where they're being chewed from underneath, and where there is no defence at all.

Read it like a calendar grid: a trap on every row, a capacity on every column. Each filled cell is one relationship — a capacity that pushes back on this trap (teal), a trap that erodes this capacity (red), a two-way struggle in which both are happening at once (split purple), or an ambiguous case where it depends on context (grey). Blank cells are pairs that don't directly interact. Hover any colour to read the rationale; click to jump to the trap.

Two things are worth staring at. The first is the colour balance: there is much more teal-and-purple than plain red — most defences exist, they are simply contested. The second is what is missing: the Overshoot row, for one, is conspicuously empty.

A trap, by definition, resists individual effort. So the framework closes on a single unifying idea borrowed from evolutionary biology: evolvability, the capacity of a system to change itself. For human societies, five higher-level capacities matter — not as a checklist, but as a set of conditions any serious response must meet.

Each one rests on specific working capacities from the section above, and all of them — adaptive, transformative, evolvability — can be sorted under five cross-cutting evolutionary processes. Each entry below carries those links in its footer.

Underneath the five evolvability capacities, the twenty-three working capacities, and any number that might be added later, sit just five deeper processes. They are the substrate every specific capacity ultimately runs on — and the unit at which gaps in the toolkit show up.

This page is a reference to the framework introduced in the 2023 paper below and extended in its 2026 follow-up:

Søgaard Jørgensen P, Jansen REV, Avila Ortega DI, Wang-Erlandsson L, Donges JF, Österblom H, Olsson P, Nyström M, Lade SJ, Hahn T, Folke C, Peterson GD, Crépin A-S. (2023). Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 379(1893): 20220261. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0261. Published under CC BY 4.0.

Søgaard Jørgensen P, Delannoy L, Maniatakou S, Folke C, Moore M-L, Olsson P. (2026). Both adaptive and transformative capacities are necessary to navigate global polycrisis. Global Sustainability, 9: e16. DOI: 10.1017/sus.2026.10053. Published under CC BY 4.0.

The figures on this page draw on both papers. The 4-phase spider, the 3-family loops, and the 14×14 interaction heatmap are adapted from Figures 1b, 2a, 2b and Supplementary Tables S1–S4 of the 2023 paper. The 14 × 23 trap–capacity matrix in section F is rendered directly from Supplementary Table 1 of the 2026 paper. The 14 trap entries draw their definitions, current phases, trends and trapping mechanisms from Supplementary Table S1 of the 2023 paper; additional indicators are sourced as cited per chart.

The poster artwork — The Anthropocene Strait — is original work by GLOBAÏA, designed as a visual companion to the framework. The interactive simulation at /anthropocene-traps/interactive/ is its real-time descendant.

The Homer quoted in section I is rendered literally, after the Loeb prose of A.T. Murray (1919, revised by George Dimock, 1995) and Richmond Lattimore's verse (1967), whose "recklessness" is kept for atasthalíai. Readers of Emily Wilson's translation will find the verdict softened — "poor fools" at line seven, "folly" in Zeus's speech — a deliberate reading, discussed in the companion essay, The Atasthalocene.

How to cite this page

GLOBAÏA (2026). The Anthropocene Traps. globaia.org/anthropocene-traps/. Accessed .

This page is published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0.