Navigating the polycrisis: assessing the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities for addressing Anthropocene traps

Social and environmental challenges are combining to form a polycrisis with potential to delay or reset many sustainability efforts. These risks raise questions about what capacities will be needed for advancing sustainability during a time of interlinked crises. Here, we evaluate the adequacy of adaptive and transformative capacities for navigating the polycrisis. Specifically, we perform a rapid assessment of their potential for addressing the 14 recently proposed Anthropocene traps. We find that ten Anthropocene traps have characteristics that challenge in total 17 of 23 adaptive and transformative capacities. On the other hand, 10 of 23 capacities - with an overrepresentation of transformative capacities - have general potential to prevent formation and progress of traps. Coevolutionary struggles between the expression of a capacity and the progression of traps are widespread. Importantly, transformative and adaptive capacities complement each other in the types of Anthropocene traps they most frequently address, with transformative capacities targeting global traps and adaptive capacities the emergent structural traps related to connectivity and pace of change. We end by proposing five unifying processes that can serve as an organizing framework for consideration of other sustainability and crisis capacities.