The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk's (CSER) special issue Futures of Research in Catastrophic and Existential Risk was recently published. CSER is an interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse.

The special issue, edited by CSER postdoc Dr Adrian Currie, brings together a wide range of research on existential and catastrophic risk. This research is increasingly multi-disciplinary and broad in scope. It considers how existential risk is conceptualized as well as challenges in communication, responsibility and epistemology. Many of the fifteen papers collected here were originally presented at our first Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk in 2016.

Contents:

Editorial

• Working together to face humanity’s greatest threats: Introduction to the Future of Research on Catastrophic and Existential Risk

Global Catastrophic Risks Broadly

• Governing Boring Apocalypses: A new typology of existential vulnerabilities and exposures for existential risk research
• Classifying global catastrophic risks
• Global catastrophic and existential risks communication scale

Specific Risks and Interventions

• Existential risk due to ecosystem collapse: Nature strikes back
• Interventions that may prevent or mollify supervolcanic eruptions
• Stratospheric aerosol injection research and existential risk
• Geoengineering tensions
• Measuring changes in urban functional capacity for climate resilience: Perspectives from Korea

Technology, Ethics and Governance

• The challenge of framing for efforts to mitigate the risks of “dual use” research in the life sciences
• Accompanying technology development in the Human Brain Project: From foresight to ethics management

Law, Policy, Governance

• Preserving the norm against chemical weapons: A civil society initiative for the 2018 4th review conference of the chemical weapons convention
• The findings of an empirical study of the application of criminal law in non-terrorist disasters and tragedies
• Risk management in a policy environment: The particular challenges associated with extreme risks
• Representation of future generations in United Kingdom policy-making

The Conference, and a number of the publications in this issue, were made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF); the conference was also supported by a supplementary grant from the Future of Life Institute. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation or the Future of Life Institute.