A guide to 9 global buzzwords for 2023, from 'polycrisis' to 'zero-dose children'
We're having a polycrisis. The pandemic has resulted in too many zero-dose children. Charities are not always succeeding in tarmac-to-arm.
These are a few of the global buzzwords you're probably going to be hearing as 2023 kicks off. Sometimes buzzwords are easy to understand. It's not that hard to figure out that a polycrisis is worse than a monocrisis.
But sometimes buzzwords are a bit perplexing — for instance, whose arm?
We asked experts in global health and development to identify and explain likely buzzwords for this year. Here's a list of nine terms — a mix of the new, the familiar and the forgotten, propelled into prominence by major events.
The overlapping of some of these events--global health emergencies, climate change and economic crises--are all contributing toward our first word, polycrisis. (Not to be confused with Collins Dictionary's word of the year 2022, "permacrisis," which refers to one dramatic event happening at the heels of another and the dread of wondering what the next one might be.)
Polycrisis
The simplest description of polycrisis might be that all of our old problems are occurring in a new way.
"All the crises we are seeing have always occurred," says Professor Danny Ralph of Cambridge's Centre for Risk Studies, "they are kind of Biblical (famines, wars, pestilence).
