What, I find myself wondering, as the year comes to a close, will the “word” of 2023 be? Perhaps we could write it down, more as a prayer than anything else.

We know that for this year Collins dictionary chose permacrisis, marking that feeling that we are lurching from one crisis to the next, in one unending blur of panic. Just as we thought we could stumble out into the light, triple vaccinated, and get back to whatever normal was, Russia invaded Ukraine, gas became weaponised, and an energy price crisis hit, followed rapidly by a cost-of-living crisis.

At first I didn’t like the term. Often, when I would read it, I would think about the children of today, growing up surrounded by words like that which suggest that this period is just the start of a long phase, the beginning of a slow build towards some kind of permadisaster as climate change and biodiversity loss bludgeon home.

Better the Oxford Dictionary’s chosen word of 2022, “goblin mode”, which at least offered some kind of solution to what to do in a permacrisis – stay home and enter a goblin state in which you lounge around, unkempt, and cease to worry about what the world thinks of you or your appearance.

At least in goblin mode, you wouldn’t be trashing the world with excessive conspicuous consumption. Perhaps goblins, even, could save the world.

Vicky Allan: Can we really protect 30% of our land and seas and feed the nation?

Now, 2022 has certainly been quite a year – and many have felt the need to sigh over the permacrisis. Wildfires raged in France, whilst record temperature highs and drought hit the UK and even Scotland sweltered and suffered water scarcity. Pakistan saw floods that would displace 30 to 50 million people, kill at least 2000 and wipe out around a million livestock and destroy crops.

There were heatwaves in China, wildfires in California, famines in Somalia and Ethiopia, flooding in Sudan. Greenhouse gas emissions are set to be the highest on record. Meanwhile, interest in the climate crisis certainly didn’t feature high in the Google top word searches of the year – except as a search about the “weather”. Scotland was given a poor report card by the Climate Change Committee, which declared our net zero plan “in danger of becoming meaningless” – lacking in detail and already in terms of current action failing on lofty goals.

What is happening looks not just like a permacrisis, but an omnicrisis. Food and fuel poverty is rocketing in the UK. A winter of strikes and discontent grips the country.

But at the same time, I’ve started to wonder if there’s something positive to be said for talking about this as a permacrisis. For there’s something else hidden in the word crisis, whose roots are in the Greek krisis, meaning decision or choice, and which is used in medicine to describe a turning point for better or worse. The year in which we saw Russia’s war in Europe create a price crisis and a knock-on cost-of-living crisis, is also one in which we saw key decisions being made. A focus, for instance, galvanised around renewable energy.

It’s in things like this renewables acceleration that I place my hope.

As Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said: “Renewables were already expanding quickly, but the global energy crisis has kicked them into an extraordinary new phase... The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the previous 20 years.” Of course, there’s still a lot of trying to fix now without thinking too much about the future.

There are still new oil and gas fields being explored in the name of energy security, and with little regard for net zero. But it did seem that, globally and nationally, there has been more talk of making choices that are win-wins for the climate. There is also more talk of different economic models – alternatives to GDP, “real growth”, degrowth.

Particularly welcome was the recent COP15 biodiversity conference, which produced a global pact to halt the decline of nature, ad brought to our attention the ways in which our marvellous world, so full of life, is already in a state of loss and growing ever more depleted.

Vicky Allan: What now after failure of Scotland’s ‘meaningless’ climate plan?

The phrase we have kept hearing, if not in the pact itself, but in for instance Scotland’s draft biodiversity strategy, was “nature positive”. At first I thought it was just more pointless and fluffy jargon, but increasingly my hope is that it becomes the axis around which we orient ourselves. Nature positive, however, would not be my chosen word for next year. The omnishambles of the permacrisis, after all, demands an appropriate antidote, a neologism. I propose “omnitransition” as an expression of the scale required (let me know if you come up with better).

Yes, a just and rapid omnitransition would be my permahope for 2023. Goblins may join the revolution too.