Natural Global Catastrophic Risks

Systemic contributions to global catastrophic risk

“…Ampli cation is closely related to the concept of vulnerability, but not equivalent to it. Vulnerability is a key concept in the study of disaster risk (UNDRR, 2019), and is also important for understanding GCR (Baum, 2023;Liu et al, 2018;Mani et al, 2023); here, we use it to refer approximately to those properties of the system which determine the magnitude of the catastrophe resulting from a given hazard or combination of hazards 6 . We nd it useful to treat ampli cation and vulnerability separately: we discuss vulnerability (and emergent trends in vulnerability of relevance to GCR) at greater length in Section 3.3.…”

“…Ampli cation would play an important role in a wide range of global catastrophe scenarios. The impacts of natural hazards like asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions would be ampli ed through their e ects on global critical infrastructure (Baum, 2023;Mani et al, 2023;Moersdorf et al, 2023); indeed, the clustering of such infrastructure near centres of volcanic activity vastly ampli es the risk even from lower-magnitude volcanic eruptions (Mani et al, 2021). As the Covid-19 pandemic has illustrated, the impact of novel infectious diseases can be vastly ampli ed by global transit networks (Baker et al, 2022) as well as by follow-on economic and social disruption.…”

“…magnitude as human extinction (existential risk) 2 ; meanwhile, GCR is itself a subcategory of "global risk" more broadly. Hazards which could lead to global catastrophe include asteroid impacts (Baum, 2023;Mani et al, 2023), large-magnitude volcanic eruptions (Cassidy & Mani, 2022), anthropogenic climate change…”

The Fragile State of Industrial Agriculture: Estimating Crop Yield Reductions in a Global Catastrophic Infrastructure Loss Scenario

“…Y crop (10) where Y PC is the predicted crop-specific (PC) yield in the respective phase 1 or 2 and Y Crop is the crop-specific yield around 2010 taken from the SPAM2010 dataset. Values above zero, resulting from the generalized linear model, were set to zero as yield increase in a global catastrophic infrastructure loss scenario was not realistic.…”

“…[ 4,7,8 ] These ideas from systemic risk have been picked up in the study of global catastrophic risks as well. [ 9,10 ] The food system is not only increasingly vulnerable to major disruptions like multiple breadbasket failures but [ 11–13 ] there are also a variety of global catastrophic risks, which could impact the food system. These include asteroid/comet impacts, volcanic eruptions, ecosystem collapse, nuclear war, and termination shock caused by solar radiation management.…”