2021 Annual Report

2021 has been a good year for GCRI. Our productivity is up relative to previous years, boosted by a growing team and rich network of outside collaborators. Our work over the past year is broadly consistent with the plans we outlined one year ago. We have adjusted well to the new realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, aided by the fact that GCRI was designed for remote collaboration from the start. Because of the pandemic, there is a sense in which no one has had a truly great …

Read More »

2020 Annual Report

2020 has been a challenging year for GCRI, as it has been for so many other organizations. The pandemic we are currently living through is, by some definitions, a global catastrophe. COVID-19 has already killed more than a million people worldwide, and has disrupted the work and lives of many others. At the same time, political turmoil in the US and around the world has demanded our attention and created both new risks and new opportunities.

Fortunately, GCRI is relatively well-positioned to operate
under these conditions. …

Read More »

2019 Annual Report

2019 has been a year of growth for GCRI. We have made good progress toward our goal, announced last year, of scaling up the organization so we can do more to reduce global catastrophic risk. We have also completed work on ongoing global catastrophic risk projects. We are especially happy with the advising and collaboration program we ran this year, through which we helped many people advance their work on global catastrophic risk while demonstrating how GCRI can operate at a larger scale.

Last year, we …

Read More »

2018 Annual Report

GCRI may now be at a turning point. We have established ourselves as leaders of the field of global catastrophic risk, with an important and distinctive role centered on the development of intelligent and practical solutions to reduce the risks. We have built up a solid track record of accomplishments of basic research and outreach to translate research ideas into action. However, we are not accomplishing nearly as much as we could because we currently only have the resources to operate at a small scale. …

Read More »

GCRI 2018-2019 Financial Position

GCRI has long been doing excellent work at a small scale. Some recent work is summarized in our blog post on 2018 accomplishments. However, we have been very limited by a lack of robust funding. We could do much more if we had the funding needed to scale up. Therefore, GCRI is now trying to raise a larger amount of funding than in the past. Specifically, we are currently seeking a total of $1.5 million. Anyone interested in contributing to this can do so via …

Read More »

GCRI 2019 Plans: Organization Development

GCRI may now be at a turning point. We have spent years advancing our understanding of global catastrophic risk, assessing the best role for our organization, and developing the capacity to grow the organization and its impact on the risks. We have established ourselves as leaders of global catastrophic risk scholarship and of the wider community that works on global catastrophic risk. GCRI has an important and distinctive role to play on global catastrophic risk. We believe the time has come for GCRI to scale …

Read More »

GCRI 2019 Plans: Global Catastrophic Risk Topics

GCRI’s ultimate aim is to develop the best ways of reducing global catastrophic risk. We recognize that global catastrophic risk is a complex and multifaceted issue area, and we do not start with any sweeping assumptions about what the best ways of reducing the risk may be. Instead, we work across a range of risks in order to identify the best opportunities. (In principle, we aspire to work across all of the risks, but at this time we can only work on some.) This is …

Read More »

Online Lecture Reflections And Plans

This past May, we kicked off a series of online lectures with Aladdin Diakun’s Towards the Effective Governance of Geoengineering: What Role for Intellectual Property?. Since then, we have held 11 different lectures, including a reprise lecture, on diverse topics including chemical pollution, artificial intelligence, ethics, and international law. The lecture series has been very successful by many counts. Now, for the first time since May, there are no new lectures scheduled, though next month we will host practice lectures for the SRA 2013 GCR …

Read More »