December Newsletter: A Turning Point For GCRI

Post Date December 13, 2018
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Dear friends,

We believe that GCRI may now be at a turning point. Having established ourselves as leaders in the field of global catastrophic risk, we now seek to scale up the organization so that we can do correspondingly more to address global catastrophic risk. To that end, we have published detailed records of our accomplishments, plans for future work, and financial needs. An overview of this information is contained in our new blog post, Summary of GCRI’s 2018-2019 Accomplishments, Plans, and Fundraising.

To begin scaling up, we …

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Resilience To Global Catastrophe

Post Date November 29, 2018
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Category aftermath, articles

View the paper “Resilience To Global Catastrophe”

One of the most important questions in the study of global catastrophic risk is how resilient global human civilization is to catastrophes. At stake here is what range of events could cause global catastrophe, and likewise how wide the scope of work on global catastrophic risk should be. A resilient civilization would only fall to a narrow range of catastrophes, and our focus could be correspondingly narrow. This short paper summarizes the state of knowledge on resilience to global …

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Resilience to Global Food Supply Catastrophes

Post Date June 17, 2015
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View the paper “Resilience to Global Food Supply Catastrophes”

A global catastrophic risk is a risk of an event that would cause major harm to global human civilization. Many global catastrophic risks are risks of global food supply catastrophes because they threaten major disruption to global food supplies. These include risks of nuclear wars, volcanic eruptions, asteroid and comet impacts, abrupt climate change, and plant disease outbreaks. Global food supply catastrophes are an important class of global catastrophic risk. This paper studies how to make humanity …

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Risk and Resilience For Unknown, Unquantifiable, Systemic, and Unlikely/Catastrophic Threats

Post Date June 17, 2015
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View the paper “Risk and Resilience For Unknown, Unquantifiable, Systemic, and Unlikely/Catastrophic Threats”

Risk and resilience are important paradigms for guiding decisions made under uncertainty, in particular decisions about how to protect systems from threats. The risk paradigm tends to emphasize reducing the probabilities and magnitudes of potential losses. The resilience paradigm tends to emphasize increasing the ability of systems to retain critical functionality by absorbing the disturbance, adapting to it, or recovering from it. This paper discusses the suitability of each paradigm for threats that …

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