The human and institutional domains decide how fast the shocks travel.

The IEA counts 750 million people without electricity in 2023, the first year of renewed progress after the 2022 reversal, with about 600 million of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Under stated policies, 645 million would still lack access in 2030, 85 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. The clean-cooking gap is larger still: roughly 2.1 billion people cook with open fires or inefficient stoves, and household air pollution kills an estimated 2.9 million people a year.

Energy access matters for the polycrisis because it sets the floor under resilience. A household without electricity cannot run cooling during a heatwave, cannot refrigerate vaccines during an outbreak, and cannot participate in the digital economy that the other systemic domains depend on. The Global Tipping Points Report notes that three-quarters of people live in net fossil-fuel-importing countries — so the clean transition is simultaneously the energy-security fix and the development fix. The two agendas are the same agenda.

WHO's 2026 fact sheet puts bacterial antimicrobial resistance at more than 4.7 million associated deaths globally in 2021. About one in six laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections worldwide were resistant to antibiotics in 2023, and resistance rose in over 40 percent of monitored pathogen–antibiotic combinations between 2018 and 2023. The economic cost compounds on the health cost: treating resistant bacterial infections alone is projected to reach $412 billion annually to 2035, with another $443 billion in productivity losses each year.

AMR is a polycrisis problem because its drivers are the other domains. Poor WASH access spreads resistant pathogens; overuse in agriculture ties it to the food system; weak health systems in the exposure epicentre make it worse fastest. The resistance gradient is the exposure gradient — highest in South-East Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where one in three reported infections is resistant.

The World Bank's International Debt Report 2024 recorded IDA-eligible countries — the world's poorest — paying a record $96.2 billion in external debt service in 2023. Every dollar of that service is a dollar not spent on water systems, clean cooking, health surveillance, or disaster recovery. When a shock lands, the countries with the least fiscal space absorb it with the fewest buffers.

The fiscal cascade connects directly to the insurance cascade on the previous page. Uninsured disaster losses force governments to borrow; borrowing raises debt service; debt service narrows the room for prevention, which guarantees larger uninsured losses next time. Breaking that loop requires the kind of concessional finance and debt-for-resilience swaps the Global Tipping Points Report identifies as the enabling condition for positive tipping points in the Global South.

The H Heuristics exposure dossier established the human half of this map: air pollution, unsafe water, extreme poverty, heat stress, hunger, disease, and displacement stack in the same households, concentrated in roughly two to three billion people, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The same countries surface at the bottom of every table — the Central African Republic, Chad, South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Yemen.

This report is the systems half of the same claim. The earth-system domains generate the hazards, the secondary impacts transmit them, and the systemic domains decide how fast they reach the exposure epicentre. The full polycrisis is the two halves joined: a connected earth-and-financial system whose shocks concentrate on the people least able to absorb them.