The polycrisis needs a sustainability- and resilience-oriented paradigm shift through innovation

The ongoing polycrisis – understood as the causal entanglement of crises across multiple systems that generates emergent harms through cascades and feedbacks – reinforces the need for governance approaches able to manage interconnected risks in coupled social–ecological systems. Systems thinking, complex risk, and multi-hazards are key to understanding the intersections in policy and decision-making. This article clarifies polycrisis as a lens for environmental policy analysis and applies a social-ecological systems framing to examine transition governance in two contrasting contexts: the European Union (EU) and China. Building on the comparative discussion, we identify concrete leverage points for crisis-robust sustainability transitions, including (i) adaptive policy mixes that preserve long-run decarbonization signals under short-run security shocks, (ii) distributional buffering and reskilling policies that protect legitimacy and policy durability, (iii) risk-aware governance of value chains and critical materials to reduce externalized vulnerabilities, and (iv) integrated land-use and ecosystem planning supported by digital monitoring and cross-scale coordination. We argue that “cultural and behavioral change” should be understood operationally as the social learning, capability-building, and legitimacy conditions that enable these instruments to be adopted and sustained. The paper concludes by outlining actionable implications for learning-oriented and justice-aware governance capable of reducing maladaptation and innovation traps under overlapping shocks.