Cross-Risk Evaluation & Prioritization

Addressing the totality of global catastrophic risk requires a holistic approach that considers the ways in which the risks are interconnected with each other. This includes analysis of the risks themselves and the opportunities to reduce them.

In 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions decreased by over 5%, or almost 2 gigatons. It was the largest ever decline as measured in gigatons, and the largest percentage decline since the 1940s. The cause was the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted lockdowns and other measures intended to slow the spread of the disease, and which inadvertently also had major environmental implications. It shows how global catastrophes can be interconnected to each other. So does the 1940s emissions decline, which was caused by World War II.

Of course, wars and pandemics are not a good way to approach the policy goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The aim should be to avoid any catastrophe, not to use one catastrophe as a means of avoiding another. Nonetheless, it is important for climate policy to account for the possible effects of catastrophes, and indeed some climate policy analysis does. The same applies for other global catastrophic risks: it is always important to account for interconnections with other global catastrophic risks.

Unfortunately, work on global catastrophic risk is often done on individual risks in isolation from each other. This “siloing” approach is part of a broader trend in research and policy in which the focus is on narrow details and not on the whole picture. The narrow approach enables a division of labor in which specialists can pursue sophisticated work on specific topics. However, a broader, more systemic and holistic approach is needed to handle interconnections between the topics and, more generally, to see the forest for the trees.

There are several important reasons to pursue a holistic, cross-cutting approach to global catastrophic risk:

* Cascading scenarios in which one global catastrophe causes another. For example, an initial catastrophe could induce a catastrophic failure of stratospheric geoengineering.

* Institutions that can address multiple risks. For example, governments can enhance and streamline their operations through all-hazards institutions covering some or all global catastrophic risks.

* Actions that can reduce one risk while increasing another. For example, proposals to use nuclear explosives to counter Earthbound asteroids could inadvertently increase nuclear war risk.

* Actions that can concurrently reduce multiple risks. For example, refuges to protect isolated populations from harm could ensure their survival through a range of global catastrophe scenarios.

Cross-risk analysis is at the core of GCRI’s raison d’être. GCRI was specifically founded as an organization dedicated to studying the totality of global catastrophic risk in order to identify synergies and tradeoffs between the risks and above all to develop the best ways of reducing them. Though our funding has mainly been for targeted work on specific risks, we have nonetheless advocated for and contributed to a holistic, systemic approach to global catastrophic risk.

Featured GCRI Publications on Cross-Risk Evaluation & Prioritization

Towards an integrated assessment of global catastrophic risk

Integrated assessment is an analysis of a topic that integrates multiple lines of research, often to inform public policy and other practical decision-making. There are several reasons to pursue an integrated assessment of global catastrophic risk, including interconnections between the risks and decisions that can simultaneously affect multiple risks. This paper presents a framework for integrated assessment of global catastrophic risk that is rooted in fundamental ethics and oriented toward informing stakeholder decisions.

Evaluating future nanotechnology: The net societal impacts of atomically precise manufacturing

Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is the assembly of materials with atomic precision. It is a hypothetical future technology that, if developed, could have radical implications for the world. To inform decisions about how aggressively to pursue APM, this paper assesses whether the aggregate impacts of APM would be good or bad for the world. The paper studies impacts on six sectors: general material wealth, environmental issues, military affairs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and space travel.

Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse

The world neglects interactions between global catastrophic risks at its own peril. Most work only considers one risk at a time. This paper shows that unusually extreme catastrophes can occur when an initial catastrophe causes a second catastrophe, resulting in a combined “double catastrophe” scenario. The specific scenario studied here involves an initial catastrophe, such as a pandemic or nuclear war, inducing a failure of geoengineering that causes catastrophic climate change.

Full List of GCRI Publications on Cross-Risk Evaluation & Prioritization

Image credits: CO2 emissions chart: International Energy Agency; tree and forest: SiddharthSL; hazmat: U.S. Air Force; crops: Marc Ryckaert; naval fleet: U.S. Navy; turbogenerator: Siemens