All countries around the world must act to reduce the risk of global catastrophes.
Global Shield is the world’s first international advocacy organization devoted to reducing all-hazards global catastrophic risk (GCR). We work with governments worldwide to enact policies to better understand, prevent, prepare for, and respond to global catastrophes, regardless of the threat that may produce them. We believe an all-hazards policy approach to addressing GCR can ensure governments are effectively shielding all of us from global catastrophes.
What is global catastrophic risk?
Broadly speaking, GCR is the risk that any major threat or combination of threats will inflict significant harm to human well-being on a global scale. These massive threats can include severe climate change, pandemics caused by pathogens even worse than Covid-19, nuclear war and the resulting nuclear winter, the misuse or poor development of advanced artificial intelligence, super volcanoes, asteroids, and more.
Each of these threats individually is terrifying and difficult to tackle. But what if we could make more progress addressing them with an all-hazards approach?
Strategic policy action
Global catastrophic risk is objectively increasing. All one has to do is look at the news each day to see new global threats in the headlines, prompted by the changing climate, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the emergent threats from new technologies. Governments are beginning to understand the severity of these threats, but political action to address the overall risk these threats pose is still insufficient. We believe that, from a policy perspective, it can be helpful to look at all of these threats together, similar to the all-hazards approach that many governmental emergency programs use. Global Shield is developing a range of pragmatic policy solutions to these challenges, and we will advocate directly with nation states for the most critical and relevant solutions.
Protecting our “Pale Blue Dot”
Like Carl Sagan before us, we are awed and humbled by the Voyager 1 photo of Earth from space, seen here in its “revisited” form, updated by NASA in 2020.
As Sagan reminds us in his book, The Pale Blue Dot, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
We created Global Shield to do our part to “preserve and cherish the pale blue dot.”