Rumtin Sepasspour
Every day, countries face a range of major threats that could cause grave harm. To deal with these threats, governments need to develop strategies, allocate budgets, assign resourcing, agree on priorities and policies, and build a risk culture and capability. But policymakers often don’t care about this nuts and bolts of governing risks that could be catastrophic. Even if they do care on some level, they tend to focus on short-term and domestic priorities and are regularly distracted by the latest twist in the media cycle or internal party shenanigans.
As a result, governments either don’t take on the task of dealing with potentially catastrophic risks or do so poorly.
Unfortunately, an inadequate system of risk governance can have severe consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic was a perfect example of how governments failed to warn or communicate about, prevent, prepare for, respond to, or recover from a known hazard.
Lack of attention is the most important driver of global catastrophic risk—the potential for mass human suffering or death at a global scale. The risk can result from conflict between nuclear powers, highly contagious diseases that could be deadly for humans and animals, climate disruptions and tipping points, and the emerging technologies that empower weapons of mass destruction and undermine democratic institutions.
No comments:
Post a Comment