Explained | What is the “new uncertainty complex” facing humans? What does the Human Development Report say about it?

New challenges of the human age, transitional strategies to cope with those, and widespread polarization are creating a new uncertainty complex

The story so far: Novel layers of uncertainty facing the world right now are interacting to create a “new uncertainty complex” never seen before in human history, says the Human Development Report 2021-2022 recently released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It explains that while humans have “long worried about plagues and pestilence, violence and war, floods and droughts”, three new sources of uncertainty have now stacked up, leaving us to navigate uncharted waters. 

The UNDP’s Human Security Report showed that six in seven people worldwide were plagued by feelings of insecurity even before the COVID-19 pandemic captured our psyches. This was the case in even in the richest countries.

Last year, researchers at Princeton University revealed that there was a sharp increase in expressions of anxiety and worry all over the world, after analysing the text of 14 million books published over the last 125 years in three languages- English, Spanish, and German. These distortions were higher even than those reported during the Great Depression and both the World Wars.

Another quarterly study , the World Uncertainty Index, covering 143 countries and published by International Monetary Fund and Stanford researchers, found that concerns about uncertainty had steadily increased since 2012, but reached a historical peak with the onset of the pandemic.

Uncertainty and insecurity are not new or necessarily greater than in the past, and there are record achievements in standards of living and technological progress. The report seeks to answer why, despite this, worries about the future are high, often rising, and different right now.

The global storm of conditions over the last couple of years has exacerbated feelings of uncertainty — the pandemic followed by the war in Ukraine disrupted global supply chains and commodity prices. They also upped food and energy insecurity, which were made worse still by record-breaking heatwaves, fires, droughts, and storms. Each of these revealed cracks in the global systems and governance on which people rely for stability.

During the pandemic, for instance, new waves following one after the other caught countries off guard. This, and the “ongoing mutability and the seesawing of lockdowns” have meant that COVID-19 generated questions for people everywhere, without any easy answers. Foremost among these, the report pointed out, was: when is this “over”?