Although the world is currently on track to reach between 2 and 3ºC of warming by 2100, this comes with large uncertainties, stemming from both the climate models and uncertainty about which emissions pathway the world will take. These uncertainties are themselves difficult to estimate, owing partly to the fact that climate models are designed to estimate the mean of the temperature distribution, not the tails. This implies a small but uncertain chance of an extreme level of warming, such as warming above 6ºC based on emissions up to 2100. The impacts of this level of warming are relatively unknown in comparison to lower levels, but may constitute an existential risk. High levels of warming may also provide greater incentive for some nations to unilaterally pursue geoengineering techniques, some of which come with potentially catastrophic levels of risk if mismanaged.
Furthermore, even keeping to 2-3ºC warming, there may be potential low-probability events which could threaten global food supplies, leading to global catastrophic or even existential risks. It is uncertain whether these types of events would be enough to truly create a catastrophic outcome, however the pathways to reducing the likelihood of this seem mostly focused on adaptation to these kinds of extreme weather events. As a result, potential work on this area can take many different forms, such as assessments or work to improve countries’ capacity to adapt to “black swan” extreme weather events, limits to adaptation, research on heat-resistant crops, etc.
Finally, climate change has the potential to be an accelerant or driver of other existential risks. This can mean viewing from a climate perspective risks traditionally considered “separate” from climate change, such as nuclear war, but also underappreciated consequences from the human response to climate change (e.g. societal collapse from negative feedback loops and fragilities in human systems, global instability driving governance & coordination failures, etc). As pointed out by Beard et al. (2021), the first two issues above focus excessively on global temperature rise and direct climate impacts according to climate and integrated assessment models, without taking into consideration human responses. We believe that this third area is therefore the largest in scope with the most capacity and promise for further research.
Further resources
Potential projects
This list contains starting points for projects, some more open-ended than others. If any accepted fellows to the ERA Summer Research Fellowship decide to take on one of these projects, they are expected to develop the idea into a full-fledged proposal in collaboration with their mentor before the start of the Fellowship in July.
Estimating Catastrophic Risks to Global Food Supply from Climate Change
Climate change is expected to significantly increase the risk of drought affecting multiple critical food producing regions at once. A recent paper estimated the risk of a simultaneous failure in all 4 major maize producing countries ~50% during the 2040s, due to severe drought. At high levels of warming, this effect could produce a catastrophic global famine.
This project will estimate these risks in more detail, with the aim of identifying the likelihood of global famine at moderate and severe levels of warming. The core research question is: are these risks serious enough to be catastrophic, especially after accounting for potential adaptations?
Adaptation to Catastrophic Risks to Global Food Supply from Climate Change
Despite the risks described above, adaptation techniques such as enhanced irrigation or genetically modified crops resistant to heat could potentially mitigate this risk. However, work on this topic is limited - for example, it is very unclear how fast sufficiently heat resistant crops could be developed and rolled out, or the degree to which irrigation can add additional risk reduction. Warming in the world’s primary food production areas may cause the areas of optimum climate for staple crops to shift slowly towards the high latitudes - how can farmers adapt to this and what are the difficulties with supplying continuing growth in global food demand despite this shift?
This project will seek to assess the potential of these adaptations and quantify the benefit of funding this in comparison with other climate adaptation and emissions reductions.
Mechanism Design for Global Cooperation under Extreme Warming
Climate change is often acknowledged as a risk that intensifies other existential risks, via global instability making cooperation on risks like nuclear war or AI safety more challenging. This project will aim to identify ways to ensure global cooperation on non-climate catastrophic or existential risks can be maintained even in the face of the anticipated effects from extreme levels of warming. This project can go in a few different directions, such as a focus on economics/game theory/mechanism design, or an international relations focus.
Changing Risks of Global Pandemics from Climate Change
Around 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic - they come from human contact with an animal population that carries the disease. The emergence of these diseases is often due to dynamic interactions between human, wildlife, and livestock populations as well as due to rapidly changing environments.
Climate change can encourage zoonotic spillover of circulating but novel pathogens from animals to humans (Rupasinghe et al., 2021) via mechanisms such as droughts or temperature change affecting the distribution of disease reservoirs and providing more chances for transmission, or by increased flooding creating more breeding sites for virus vectors. Improved city planning together with better drainage systems and biosecurity practices can help populations adapt to this danger. This project aims to quantify the change to risk of global pandemics from climate change and work on ways to mitigate the effects.
Risks to Interstate Conflict from Geoengineering
Geoengineering refers to a set of proposed technologies which aim to make a large-scale intervention in the climate system to mitigate climate change. For example, the most well known technique is arguably stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves placing large volumes of aerosol particles into the stratosphere in order to cool the Earth (Halstead, 2018). However, there are many less studied proposals, including marine cloud brightening and ocean fertilisation. This project aims to survey these techniques and examine the risks to interstate conflict from potential unilateral use of a geoengineering technique, and the complex governance challenges that this implies.
Longtermist Policy Ideas: Climate
Fund research and development of innovative approaches to clean energy.
Fund research into safe geoengineering technologies and geoengineering governance.
Improve our understanding of the permafrost and methane clathrate feedbacks.
Improve our understanding of cloud feedbacks.
Better characterise our uncertainty about the climate sensitivity: what can and can’t we say about the right-hand tail of the distribution.
Improve our understanding of extreme warming (e.g. 5–20 °C), including searching for concrete mechanisms through which it could pose a plausible threat of human extinction or the global collapse of civilisation.
