Dear friends,
GCRI’s 2023 Advising and Collaboration Program is now open. We welcome anyone who is interested in getting more involved in global catastrophic risk, or advancing your career in it. We also welcome those who would simply like to connect or reconnect. This year, we are emphasizing five themes: diversity and inclusion; AI governance; AI politics; public scholarship; and students and early-career professionals. Your interests do not need to fit within one or more these themes to participate, but it helps if they do. Please see the full announcement on our website for further information and how to apply. We hope to hear from you.
Additionally, in January, Deputy Director McKenna Fitzgerald left the GCRI team. McKenna initially joined GCRI in 2020 as Project Manager and Research Assistant; she was promoted to the position of Deputy Director in 2021. She was a tremendous contributor to all aspects of the organization, including research, operations, and planning. We wish her the best in her future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Seth Baum
Executive Director
Public Health and Nuclear Winter
A new paper Public health and nuclear winter: Addressing a catastrophic threat has been published in the Journal of Public Health Policy. The paper is co-authored by Andreas Vilhelmsson, a Researcher in Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Lund University and a 2022 GCRI Fellow, and GCRI Executive Director Seth Baum.
GCRI Statements
The GCRI Statement on Race and Intelligence, published in January 2023, addresses the harmful and scientifically dubious idea of a genetic basis of racial differences in intelligence, prompted by problematic comments on the topic made by global catastrophic risk researcher Nick Bostrom.
The GCRI Statement on the Demographic Diversity of the GCRI Team, January 2023 acknowledges and expresses displeasure about the fact that, following the departures of McKenna Fitzgerald and Andrea Owe, the GCRI team lacks demographic diversity. GCRI is committed to advancing demographic diversity within our own team and the broader field of global catastrophic risk.
Urban Design and Climate Change
Two popular media articles by Executive Director Seth Baum call for urban design changes that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions while providing other benefits. Both are focused on the New York City metropolitan area, where Baum lives. New York’s housing plans must address affordability—& climate change was published in City Limits. Even with electric vehicles, an expanded turnpike extension would be bad for the environment was published in The Jersey Journal.
