The Emerging Three Dimensions of Resilience

In early September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution encouraging the use of the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately represents the size of land masses like Africa. However, like the Mercator projection before it, the Equal Earth map conditions us to think of our world in East-West terms, with the polar regions quite literally shown as the edge of the Earth. This can obscure key nuances of how politics and the economy are evolving.

A new perspective on geography and economic power

In a speech to the European Parliament in mid-September, Canadian Prime Minister Carney evoked the centuries-old exchanges between Europe and Canada and noted that his country shares 3000 km of boundaries with Greenland in the Arctic. That reference is a significant detail: Canada’s economy has long been concentrated along its southern border, where the bulk of its population lives, and the unique, deep relationship with the United States has been a constant, underlying assumption. Speaking at the 2026 Canada Investment Summit two days earlier, Carney articulated a vision explicitly linking Canada’s strength and strategic autonomy to its openness and drew attention to Canada’s three coastlines and the access they offer to Europe and Asia. This was presented not as a pivot away from the US; instead, it is the addition of new connections to the world economy.

The three dimensions of resilience

Carney’s remarks reveal an understanding that the world economy is no longer organised along a primarily east-west axis, nor even a purely geographic logic. This perspective points to new imperatives and opportunities for functional partnerships which lead to more resilient economic networks.

1. Geographic reorientation: Climate change and geopolitics have put the Arctic in the spotlight and reminded us of the three-dimensional reality of our planet. But this is not the only shift. Successive supply chain disruptions related to COVID-19, the grounding of a containership in the Suez Canal, the effects of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the Black Sea, disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and a series of crop failures from extreme weather have all highlighted the need to diversify supply chains and transit routes.
2. Functional complementarity: These vulnerabilities have highlighted the imperative to reduce excessive dependencies on single sources, providing fertile ground for forging alliances among like-minded countries to leverage functional complementarity related to resources, capabilities, and strategic assets.
3. Network resilience: In this way of thinking, an alliance entails a rich network of relationships to minimise single points of failure. The point is to enhance network resilience through diversification and redundancy.

This shifts thinking from basic interdependence to intertwined resilience. The strategic objective is no longer simply to secure access to resources, but to build diverse webs of relationships and systems capable of absorbing shocks and alternative routes in case of disruptions. Carney used the metaphor of trees in a forest whose interlaced roots and canopies provide greater stability and shelter than could a single tree.

How Europe is moving from vision to policy action

Ursula von der Leyen’s 2026 State of the EU address is one of many recent occasions when an EU official outlined how the EU is putting this approach into action. She cited the series of enhanced trade agreements with India, Mercosur, Mexico, Australia and Indonesia that the European Commission signed in the preceding year. These accords go beyond traditional trade matters and include elements that address strategic autonomy. These trade agreements offer opportunities to diversify supply chains and reduce concentrated dependencies. Adding such redundancy at the system level reduces exposure to chokepoints and single points of failure. The European Union is expected to release an updated Arctic Policy aligned with this three-dimensional perspective before the end of 2026.

Climate change, resource access, infrastructure, security, and geopolitics are converging to reshape economic relationships. Citing the need to create global coalitions to support resilience within a rules-based system, von der Leyen invited Canada to become the EU’s first associate member, a yet-to-be-defined status but one that she made clear entailed “the highest level” of cooperation, listing AI, critical minerals, defence, intelligent industrialisation, cybersecurity and other issues that feature frequently in the news.

What is striking about this emerging coalition is that it is defined in relation to a functional objective, not in opposition to any other political actor. That is one of the insights from the forest metaphor used by Carney.

Trees don’t create a defence pact against meadows; instead, each tree grows towards the other, and the resulting entwinement makes the collective more robust than any individual.

This metaphor provides an alternative perspective on the source of economic strength. In the emerging economic order, the winners may be those who understand how to build resilient networks of complementary capabilities. It is not just about multiplying economic relationships; it is also about designing the web of relationships to avoid compounding vulnerabilities, just like a forest will be more robust if many different tree varieties are intermingled.

What this means for business

Just as governments increasingly prioritise resilience through complementary partnerships, businesses must rethink the assumptions underpinning their own international strategies to mitigate risks and make the most of emerging opportunities to thrive despite the storms ahead.

Photo credit: baona via iStock