As the global pandemic ravaged the world, concern and interest about public risk management has surged, as well as a will to improve current systems to prevent future global catastrophes.

To capitalize on this opportunity, in the last few months we (Juan García, Jaime Sevilla and Ángela María Aristizábal) have planned and began a project to collaborate with public officials working on Spanish risk management.

In this article we will introduce our goals, our results so far and planned next steps.

Our goals

As we see it, our project has two main components. One involves creating authoritative online content in Spanish about Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs). The other is about collaborating with the Spanish government to identify and fix gaps in public risk management.

We focused on Spain because the three of us are Spanish-speaking, two of us are Spanish and one of us lives in Spain, so we share a language, a culture and a context with Spanish public servants. Besides, work in countries other than the UK and USA seemed relatively neglected in the GCR community.

Some high level goals we are working towards include:

Creating a link between the global GCR community and Spanish civil servants
Move the culture of public risk management in Spain towards active foresight
Promoting the creation of plans to prevent and mitigate priority GCRs (food chain disruption, nuclear war, extreme climate change, AI risk, pandemics, etc)
Creating a community of spanish-speaking experts working on GCRs to facilitate collaboration, and eventually produce policy recommendations.
Creating public resources in Spanish introducing GCRs to a wide audience

Our work so far

Our two main outputs so far are our webpage and our report on Civil Protection in Spain.

riesgoscatastroficosglobales.com

We created our website (riesgoscatastroficosglobales.com) to be a public repository of information about global catastrophic risks.

Screenshot of riesgoscatastróficosglobales.com

It hosts a directory of Spanish-speaking experts working on GCRs, and several articles in Spanish about GCRs.

You can read more about our website here.

Report on the Spanish Civil Protection system

The National Civil Protection System is a service designed to protect people and material goods during emergencies and catastrophes.

We have interviewed the directors of six organizations that are part of this system, and written...

Riesgos Catastróficos Globales