Dear friends,
Ongoing headline news discusses possible global catastrophes. In February, it was a close call with an asteroid. Now, there’s the threat of nuclear war with North Korea. What I’m most worried about is the H7N9 flu virus – see Laurie Garrett’s excellent article Is This a Pandemic Being Born? It can be a lot to keep track of, and so this month GCRI is announcing a new GCR news summary initiative.
We’re also announcing a new research paper focusing on the survivors of global catastrophe. This is a dark, grim subject, but a tremendously important one. Most of the research attention thus far has (quite understandably) focused on preventing global catastrophes. With this paper we seek to help establish a new line of inquiry on global catastrophe survivors in order to help ensure that survivors succeed in adapting to post-catastrophe conditions and recovering civilization.
As always, thank you for your interest in our work. We welcome any comments, questions, and criticisms you may have. Please also consider supporting our work by getting involved or making a donation.
Sincerely,
Seth Baum, Executive Director
GCRI Launches News Summary Initiative
To help you keep track of all news related to global catastrophic risk, GCRI is launching a GCR news summary initiative in partnership with Robert de Neufville. We are compiling GCR news and posting monthly summaries on our blog. We’re using ‘news’ in the broadest sense of the word, to include anything new: current events, commentaries, announcements, etc, related to any GCR topics, in particular GCRI’s topics of research interest. We also invite you to help us compile news items. If you know of something that may be worth including in the next news summary, please post it in the comment thread of the current summary, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
For the first edition, please see GCR News Summary March 2013.
New Paper On Global Catastrophe Adaptation And Recovery
This paper develops the concepts of adaptation to and recovery from global catastrophe. If global catastrophe occurs, then any survivors must adapt to post-catastrophe conditions, or else they will die out. If adaptation succeeds, the survivors may then be able to recover civilization. This paper discusses the importance of global catastrophe adaptation and recovery and analyzes the environmental and social stressors that survivors may face. The analysis, though tentative, points to steps that can be taken now, before catastrophe, to aid survivors’ adaptation and recovery. See discussion on the GCRI blog.
Timothy M. Maher, Jr. and Seth D. Baum, 2013. Adaptation to and recovery from global catastrophe. Sustainability, vol. 5, no. 4 (April), pages 1461-1479.
Join GCRI At The Society For Risk Analysis 2013 Annual Meeting
As announced last month, GCRI is organizing global catastrophic risk sessions at the SRA 2013 Annual Meeting (8-11 December, Baltimore). If you have something to present on any topic related to global catastrophic risk, we want to hear from you. Please send a short (1-5 sentence) speaker bio and presentation description to Seth Baum (seth [at] gcrinstitute.org). For information about previous GCRI SRA sessions, please click here.
