Urgency in the sense you seem to have in mind is indeed a relevant consideration in cause prioritization, but I think it should be regarded as a heuristic for finding promising causes rather than as an additional factor in the ITN framework. See BrownHairedEevee's comment for one approach to doing this, proposed by Toby Ord. If you instead wanted to build 'urgency' into the framework, you would need to revise one of the existing factors so that the relevant units are canceled out when the three existing terms and this fourth new term are multiplied together, in such a way that the resulting quantity is still denominated in good done / extra person or dollar (cf. dimensional analysis). But I don't think there's a natural or intuitive way of doing this.

Separately, note that the term 'urgency' is sometimes used in EA to refer to a different idea. Some people, e.g. some negative-leaning folk, believe that the felt urgency of an aversive experience is a reason for prioritizing its alleviation, over and above its intensity and duration. In this sense, animal welfare seems (arguably) more, rather than less, urgent than AI risk. I think Rockwell has this sense in mind when they object to your choice of terminology.

Yes! In chapter 6 of The Precipice, Toby Ord talks about prioritizing risks that are more urgent, a.k.a. "soon, sudden, and sharp":

• Risks that strike sooner rather than later should be prioritized: "One reason is that risks that strike later can be dealt with later, while those striking soon cannot. Another is that there will probably be more resources devoted to risks that occur later on, as humanity becomes more powerful and more people wake up to humanity's predicament. This makes later risks less neglected. And finally, we can see more clearly what to do about risks that are coming to a head now, whereas our work on later risks has more chance of being misdirected.... This makes later risks less tractable right now than earlier ones." (p. 180)
• We should also prioritize potential catastrophes that we expect to cause damage more suddenly, or rapidly. More slow-burning risks like climate change give the public and policymakers a greater chance to react, whereas catastrophes with sudden effects like a rapidly spreading pandemic are more likely to catch these actors off guard.
• Finally, for similar reasons, we should prioritize potential catastrophes that are more sharp, or less likely to be preceded by "warning shots".

Outside of x-risks, I've operationalized the "urgency" of problems as something I called stickiness, or the rate at which they are expected to grow or shrink over time:

When it comes to comparing non-longtermist problems from a longtermist perspective, I find it useful to evaluate them based on their "stickiness": the rate at which they will grow or shrink over time.

A problem's stickiness is its annual growth rate. So a problem has positive stickiness if it is growing, and negative stickiness if it is shrinking. For long-term planning, we care about a problem's expected stickiness: the annual rate at which we think it will grow or shrink. Over the long term - i.e. time frames of 50 years or more - we want to focus on problems that we expect to grow over time without our intervention, instead of problems that will go away on their own.

For example, global poverty has negative stickiness because the poverty rate has declined over the last 200 years. I believe its stickiness will continue to be negative, barring a global catastrophe like climate change or World War III.

On the other hand, farm animal suffering has not gone away over time; in fact, it has gotten worse, as a growing number of people around the world are eating meat and dairy. This trend will continue at least until alternative proteins become competitive with animal products. Therefore, farm animal suffering has positive stickiness. (I would expect wild animal suffering to also have positive stickiness due to increased habitat destruction, but I don't know.)

Technically speaking this could be considered as part of "scale" (i.e. lock-in situations effect all future beings). 

For sake of clear communication, and avoiding the potentially asinine conversations long-termism can generate, including urgency seems like a smart idea. 

"Urgency" strikes me as very much the wrong word here. If you want to feel the urgency of e.g. ending animal farming, just watch these numbers tick by for a few seconds. It sounds like you're pretty directly describing x-risk (which has two distinct flavors). Prioritizing x-risk is a reasonable choice but an outcome or step in the process of cause prioritization, rather than a primary input.

This example seems a bit under-specified; maybe you could flesh it out more?

There seem to be a few things going on:

1. Some 'cause areas' (or 'problems') may be relevant now, but only relevant in the future with a certain probability

• e.g., 'animal welfare after the year 2200' is only relevant if humans make it to 2200)
• But 'animal welfare between 2023 and 2200' is relevant as long as we make it until then

2. Some cause areas (e.g., preventing a big meteor from hitting the earth in 2200) will affect the probability that the others are relevant (or for how long they are relevant)

3. Some problems may be deferred to 'solve later' without much cost.

• Hard to find an example here ... maybe 'preventing suffering from meteor strikes predicted between the years 2200-2300, presuming we can do little to improve the technology to avoid that before say, 2150'