Climate & Environment

Featured GCRI Publications on Climate & Environment

Full List of GCRI Publications on Climate & Environment

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Introduction

Featured Publications

Full List of Publications

An Introduction to Climate & Environment

A stable environment may be necessary for human civilization. The human species is hundreds of thousands of years old, but available evidence shows that civilization only arose within the last 10,000 years. This corresponds to the Holocene, a geological epoch with a relatively warm and stable climate. Furthermore, during the Holocene, agriculture was independently developed in numerous locations around the world, as shown in the image. The favorable conditions of the Holocene may have led to the development of agriculture and in turn civilization as it exists today.

The human population has grown so large and so advanced that it is now the dominant driver of global environmental change. Due to human activity, there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than any time within millions of years. Ecosystems worldwide are being destroyed to make room for agriculture and human settlement. The biosphere is currently going through one of the most extreme mass extinction events in the history of the planet. Human activity is destabilizing the global environment, pushing the planet so far away from the favorable Holocene conditions that many experts believe Earth is now in a new geological epoch, which they term the Anthropocene.

The human-induced environmental changes are now harming human civilization. Extreme weather events are hitting populations all around the world: heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and more. The intensity of these events is a clear byproduct of human activity, consistent with expectations from scientific research. As human activity continues to produce pollution and degrade ecosystems, these harms project to only get worse.

Whether global environmental change amounts to a global catastrophic risk has been a point of debate among researchers. At issue is whether the projected changes may be enough to cause something like the collapse of global human civilization. Some analyses have looked at the projections and concluded that civilization would endure. Others, including those by GCRI, have pointed to uncertainties in the projections to argue that global catastrophe cannot be ruled out, especially when considering interconnections between global environmental change and other catastrophic risks. As long as global catastrophe cannot be ruled out, it is appropriate to regard global environmental change as a global catastrophic risk.

For practical purposes, the debate about global catastrophic risk often has limited significance. A large portion of the actions needed to address the risk are worth taking regardless of whether the risk amounts to a global catastrophic risk. Indeed, many of these actions can be justified even without accounting for their value for addressing global environmental change because they make people’s lives healthier, happier, and more affluent. As a matter of strategy, it is often best to focus on these actions.

There are some decisions that hinge more on an accounting of global catastrophic risk. How much should the field of global catastrophic risk focus on global environmental change? How should decision-makers assess tradeoffs between global environmental change and other global catastrophic risks? Should extreme measures to to address global environmental change, such as geoengineering, be considered even if they pose a global catastrophic risk? To address these questions, research on the global catastrophic risk posed by global environmental change is needed.

Image credits: origins of agriculture: Joe Roe; flood in Hyderabad, India, in 2020: Strike Eagle; Bogotá Ciclovía: Lombana

Featured GCRI Publications on Climate & Environment

Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk

Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? This paper, published in the journal Futures, addresses the question by examining the definition of global catastrophic risk and by comparing climate change to another severe global risk, nuclear winter. The paper concludes that yes, climate change is a global catastrophic risk, and potentially a significant one.

Integrating the Planetary Boundaries and Global Catastrophic Risk Paradigms

Planetary boundaries and global catastrophic risk are two paradigms that have emerged in recent years to study major global threats to humanity and nature. This paper, published in the journal Ecological Economics, integrates the two paradigms into a new framework, Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN).

Double Catastrophe: Intermittent Stratospheric Geoengineering Induced by Societal Collapse

Most research on global catastrophes only analyzes one risk at a time. This paper, published in the journal Environment Systems and Decisions, argues for systems analysis of interactions between risks. It analyzes a “double catastrophe” scenario in which an initial catastrophe induces a catastrophic failure of climate geoengineering.

Full List of GCRI Publications on Climate & Environment