Cross-Risk Systems

Featured GCRI Publications on Cross-Risk Systems

Full List of GCRI Publications on Cross-Risk Systems

On this page:

Introduction

Featured Publications

Full List of Publications

An Introduction to Cross-Risk Systems

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, systemic, 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.

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

Featured GCRI Publications on Cross-Risk Systems

All-Hazards Policy for Global Catastrophic Risk

Whereas government policy for global catastrophic risk often addresses one risk at a time, this report argues that governments should pursue policies that address multiple global catastrophic risks at a time. All-hazards policies would leverage similarities and linkages between the risks to achieve more benefits for reducing the risk.

Evaluating Future Nanotechnology: The Net Societal Impacts of Atomically Precise Manufacturing

Atomically precise manufacturing (APM) is a hypothetical future technology that could have dramatic societal impacts. This paper, published in the journal Futures, assesses the net societal impacts of APM across six sectors: general material wealth, environmental issues, military affairs, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and space travel.

Towards an Integrated Assessment of Global Catastrophic Risk

Integrated assessment is an interdisciplinary analysis of a topic that integrates multiple lines of research. This paper, published in a UCLA workshop proceedings, presents a concept for and some initial work towards an integrated assessment of global catastrophic risk, developed over several years by GCRI.

Full List of GCRI Publications on Cross-Risk Systems