The world is facing an array of complex challenges, and it’s no longer possible to work out where one ends and the next begins.

A whole range of existential threats are hitting us at once.  They’re all interconnected and each one would be difficult to face on its own.  We have to contend with facing them all at once.

“Metacrisis” is a term used by scientists to engage with the hugely complex web of interconnected threats that are all unravelling at once. We cannot disentangle each crisis from the others, they are all linked, and we are personally affected by each separate crisis and by the whole. The Beacon Project isn’t just here to help people respond to climate change, or their own mental health crisis, or growing political divides. We are here to look at the whole mess, to be honest about the scale of the change that’s happening, and support people through it all.

We face new challenges, and a lot of our standard responses won’t help. We need to learn new ways to manage ourselves and our lives, and to contribute to a better future.

Factors we’re facing include:

• Shifting weather patterns across the world, leading to more extreme weather (hurricanes, droughts, storms, floods, landslides, etc).  For now, this is primarily affecting poorer countries in the global South.

• Ever greater economic instability, affecting both nations and individuals as everything gets more expensive and quality of life drops.

• Rising political tensions as it becomes clearer that we can’t return to Business As Unsual, and people become scared about what this means for them.

• Degrading healthcare and social services, meaning there’s only a safety net if you can afford one.

• Political apathy from well-intentioned people, as we watch our leaders make our problems worse. This vacuum accelerates a lurch to the far right, as only these brutal and naive ideas seem to offer any solutions.

• The breakdown of ecologies and the mass death of key species.  Many of these species play essential roles in creating clean air, breaking down waste, pollinating crops, and other processes that have to happen for life to continue. On a personal level, many people are experiencing grief for the dying of the world.

• The breakdown of the very nature of truth, thanks to unscrupulous leaders, social media echo chambers, AI content and algorithms.  This makes it much harder for us to create cohesive responses to our challenges.

• A crisis in mental health around the world, as the disconnect worsens between people's daily lives and the obvious realities of the Metacrisis.

• Weak local infrastructure and resilience.  We cannot feed ourselves, we have destroyed much of our farmland through intensive agriculture, and we cannot manufacture the things we need.  In a stable, globalised economy this made sense.  As international ties unravel, it leaves us vulnerable.

• Increasingly, nobody knows how to fix things, or things are manufactured so they can’t be fixed, and nobody knows how to grow food, purify water, generate electricity, create community with their neighbours, or anything else that might be essential in a collapsing economy. When systems begin to fail, this leaves us all intense vulnerable.