View the paper “Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk”

Is climate change a global catastrophic risk? Warming temperatures are already causing a variety harms around the world, some quite severe, and they project to worsen as temperatures increase. However, despite the massive body of research on climate change, the potential for extreme global harms remains highly uncertain and controversial. This paper addresses the question by examining the theoretical definition of global catastrophic risk and by comparing climate change to another severe global risk, nuclear winter. …

View the paper “On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity”

Diversity is an important ethical concept. It’s also relevant to global catastrophic risk in at least two ways: the risk of catastrophic biodiversity loss and the need for diversity among people working on global catastrophic risk. It’s additionally relevant to scenarios involving extreme good, such as in well-designed advanced AI. However, the ethics of diversity has been remarkably understudied. To help address the full range of issues involving diversity, this paper presents a foundational study of the …

2023 was a year of learning and transition for GCRI, and likewise a relatively quiet year for us. A year ago, we lost two team members, McKenna Fitzgerald and Andrea Owe, leaving the GCRI team with just its two co-founders, Seth Baum and Tony Barrett. We certainly miss the excellent contributions of our former team members. Nonetheless, in our newly streamlined situation, we have taken the opportunity to reinvest in ourselves and recalibrate the direction of our activities.

In our 2022 Annual Report, we described our …