Global Catastrophic Biological Risks

Assessing the Threat of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks

• Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) threaten worldwide damage to human welfare and the long-term trajectory of humankind.
• Global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) are biological risks that could cause severe and global damage to human welfare.
• A long-termist perspective argues that making humanity's future better is a key objective in decision-making.
• The threshold for when a biological event starts to threaten human civilization is high, around a death toll of 10% of the human population.
• Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) causes great human suffering worldwide and could become a bigger problem, but it is not a plausible GCBR.
• A pandemic that kills less than 10% of the human population could still be among the worst events in human history.
• Biological GCBRs are controversial, and opinions vary on what events pose a credible threat to human civilization.
• Evidence for the plausibility of GCBRs comes from expert opinion, historical events, worrying features of advancing biotechnology, and numerical estimates.
• Expert communities have highlighted the danger of very large-scale biological catastrophes, but not all large-scale events would constitute a GCBR.
• The balance of expert opinion on the likelihood of GCBRs is hard to assess, but there is substantial skepticism.
• A 2008 global catastrophic risks survey offers median estimates of the likelihood of a given event occurring before 2100.
• Mitigating GCBRs is important because they could cause vastly greater damage than other disasters and potentially have even more long-lasting effects.