The world is in crisis right now, but the summer is shaping up to be much worse—for reasons beyond every country’s control, including America’s.
President Trump’s war on Iran is the cause of the current crisis. Iran’s retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz to most trade has caused oil and natural gas prices to skyrocket, forcing countries to find creative ways to cut energy demand, and caused a fertilizer shortage that is certain to reduce crop yields around the world while also increasing the costs of agricultural goods. All of this comes as economic growth has slowed globally and governments have amassed record levels of debt.
And then, in a couple of months, we’ll likely have El Niño to contend with too. Welcome to the polycrisis.
That term, which was coined back in the 1970s, has gained popularity in recent years—thanks in part to Columbia professor Adam Tooze. Popularly, it’s sometimes seen as shorthand for “a lot of bad things happening all at once,” but that misses its real meaning. A true polycrisis is not a pile-up of unrelated calamities. Rather, it occurs when separate crises in different systems become entangled, feeding off each other and producing damage greater than the sum of their parts.
Consider fertilizer. The Persian Gulf region is a major producer of it, and roughly one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, both natural gas and sulfur are critical inputs for fertilizer production, and Persian Gulf supplies of these commodities have also been cut off. This has caused fertilizer plants in South Asia to shut down, while China, one of the world’s largest fertilizer suppliers, has restricted exports to protect its domestic market.
So global fertilizer prices are surging, just as the spring planting season begins across the northern hemisphere. Around the world, governments are scrambling to secure fertilizer supplies and concerns are growing about food security in developing countries and rising grocery prices in wealthier ones. Farmers have been advised to expect tighter supply and margin pressures. In the U.S, this has already resulted in the lowest planting of spring wheat since 1970.
Now add weather. Forecasts predict that 2026 will be one of the hottest years on record, as the concentration of human-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise. Extreme heat accelerates moisture evaporation from soil, aggravates droughts, and reduces crop yields. Worse, there’s an 80 percent chance that an El Niño will develop this year, altering global rainfall patterns and triggering droughts in some regions and floods in others. NASA estimates that El Niño harms crop yields on at least a quarter of the world’s farmland. And there is a 25 percent chance this will be a “super” El Niño, intense enough to cause globally catastrophic extreme weather.
Research shows a strong El Niño can have an impact on global food supplies that causes six million children to go hungry. But these calculations do not include a global fertilizer shortage. Climate stress with adequate fertilizer is challenging. Climate stress without it is an entirely different order of crisis.
Unfortunately, these two crises are largely locked in, and there is little we can do in the short term to prevent their collision during the 2026 growing season. Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopened tomorrow, it would take time to restore global supply chains. The seeds of the polycrisis have already been planted, both literally and figuratively.
Yet food is only one system facing a shock. The Iran war is upending global energy markets, driving inflation, and lowering economic growth around the world. And this is all occurring at a time when many countries are still burdened by record levels of public debt left over from the pandemic, something the International Monetary Fund has termed “the fiscal version of long COVID.”
Research shows that food price shocks can act as a “threat multiplier,” transforming existing political dissatisfaction into widespread violent uprisings. As evidence, a global food price crisis in 2007–08 and a similar spike in food prices in 2010–11 caused riots and political instability in many countries.
The pressures building this summer are broader than what we’ve seen in the past, and the political and humanitarian consequences will be severe. Our institutions were not built to manage interrelated crises. Defense ministries watch the Strait of Hormuz, agriculture departments track fertilizer prices, climate agencies issue El Niño bulletins, and Treasury officials supervise debt levels. Each institution monitors and tries to manage crises in a single system, but nobody is tasked with modeling and mitigating the consequences when apparently distinct crises converge.
An effective response demands an integrated playbook. Contingency plans for this summer’s harvests need to simultaneously account for fertilizer shortages and extreme weather. International coordination should extend to fertilizer allocation, not just oil reserves. A planned United Nations fertilizer coordination initiative is a strong start, but developing countries also need urgent help diversifying their fertilizer import supply chains. Humanitarian organizations must prepare for dramatically elevated demand for food aid, and donors need to mobilize now—not after the harvests fail.
In the longer term, the world’s multilateral system needs standing capacity to monitor how crises in different domains interact, so that we stop being repeatedly blindsided by cascading crises that careful analysis could have anticipated. This is what polycrisis analysis seeks to address. The goal is not to replace specialists but to develop the tools and foster the conversations that track risk interactions across silos before containable shocks compound into systemic breakdowns.
None of this is happening at the required pace. Around the world, farmers are preparing to plant while facing both drought forecasts and disrupted supplies of fuel and fertilizer. They’re on the front lines of this polycrisis right now, but soon we all may be embroiled in it.
