Global Agenda Council on Catastrophic Risks 2011

A catastrophic risk is one that seriously threatens the well-being of a large number of individuals and the environment in which they live. In most cases the risk has long-term impacts affecting generations to come. The council aims to design strategies for preventing and responding to large-scale threats, including terrorism, natural disasters, nuclear accidents, climate change, pandemic infections and financial crises. Despite the diversity of these threats, treating catastrophic risk as a unified field for inquiry is a useful, coherent and important endeavour as they are tied together by numerous causal links and commonalities.