Between hope and despair: the struggle between sustainability transformations and polycrisis in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a product of locked-in cultural evolutionary trajectories that are bringing us on the verge of a global polycrisis, where global environmental and social disruption amplify each other. Sustainability transformations trying to change this trajectory must be informed be informed by these underlying dynamics dynamics or they risk being overwhelmed by the dynamics of business-as-usual. In this talk I give an overview of recent and ongoing empirical synthesis research on dynamics and interactions of polycrisis and sustainability transformations in the Anthropocene. Doing so, I will also dive into case studies, such as antibiotic resistance that illustrate the particular challenges of governing coevolutionary dynamics between human culture and the living planet.