Global Catastrophic Risk
Our Global Catastrophic Risk section focuses on reducing risks in the areas of pandemic preparedness and biosecurity.
Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. With enough thought and foresight, civilisation could survive for millions of years more. This means that whatever you value, be it happiness, knowledge, creativity, or something else, there could be much more to come in the future.
For those who value future generations, a top priority should be to create a resilient world and safeguard the future of civilisation.
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Nuclear threat initiative’s biosecurity programs
For most of human history, the greatest risk of mass fatalities has stemmed from pandemics. The poor health, deaths, and economic and political disruption caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows the scale of damage that pandemics can cause. Compared to the worst pandemics in history, however, COVID-19 is relatively mild. In the 1300s, the Black Death plague outbreak killed 30-50% of the European population.1 The 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ killed 50 million to 100 million people,2 more people than died in World War One. These events are outliers, but history is punctuated by episodes of mass death from disease outbreaks.
Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organisation focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperilling humanity. NTI drives systemic change that creates a safer world by galvanising large-scale institutional adoption of proven global security practices and programmes. Their institutional objectives address both nuclear and biological weapons6, but we specifically recommend their work on risks from biological events, such as the outbreak of an engineered pandemic. Biological weapons pose a serious threat to humanity’s long-term future and we believe efforts to reduce this risk are relatively neglected.
Centre for health security at johns hopkins university
The Center for Health Security (CHS) at the Bloomberg School of Public Health is a think tank at Johns Hopkins University which researches and advocates for improved biosecurity policy in the US and internationally.
Cheaper and more accessible biotechnologies like gene synthesis could potentially greatly increase the probability of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks - global catastrophes involving biological agents.4 Researchers have, accidentally or otherwise, demonstrated the ability to design pathogens with dangerous new features.5
Improvements in biotechnology will bring great gains for human health, enabling us to cure genetic diseases, create new vaccines, and make other important medical advances. However, biotechnology will also allow humans to modify the features of pathogens.
CHS is at the forefront of efforts to bring increased attention to Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, which are the focus of one third of CHS’s work.6 The remainder of CHS’s work focuses on other biosecurity and pandemic preparedness issues, many aspects of which are likely to help reduce the risk of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks.