GCRs mitigation: the missing Sustainable Development Goal

Abstract

Thanks to Luca Righetti, Elise Bohan, Fin Moorhouse, Max Daniel, Konrad Seifert and Maxime Stauffer for their valuable comments and thoughts on the draft and future steps. Thanks to Owen for telling me to turn this idea into a post! Summary and introduction Throughout this post, I will explore some overlaps between sustainability (focusing on Sustainable Development Goals) and longtermism (focusing on Global Catastrophic Risks mitigation). I wrote this over a two-week period to get some tentative thoughts out. My goal with posting this is to find other people interested in thinking about the intersection of sustainable development and GCRs mitigation as well as to invite feedback for how/if to proceed with research or practical projects in this area. The write-up doesn’t represent any strongly held and stable views, but is meant to explore if there is a policy opportunity for longtermists to work with sustainable development policies. More specifically, I want to see if it is worth pushing the next SDGs agenda with a bigger focus on GCRs mitigation. Roughly, I want to explore if this is a bridge worth building: In the first section, I will briefly overview the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs), explaining why it could make sense to start building a link between these. In section 2, I will explore how GCRs mitigation fits into the SDGs, using COVID-19 as an example of how risk mitigation is foundational to sustainable development. In section 3, I will quickly point out some potential overlaps between longtermism and sustainability and mention the idea of a risk budget as the ultimate non-renewable resource. In section 4, I will portray a way of understanding SDGs in terms of longtermist grand strategies, followed by a final section exploring the pros and cons of building this bridge and possible future steps if it is worth pursuing. 1. OVERVIEW OF SDGS AND GCRS SDGs I am broadly interested in the overlap between sustain