Skip to content

Publication

A horizon scan of global catastrophic risks

Authors

Giuseppe Dal Prá, Christopher Y.C. Chan, Timur Burkhanov, Nathaniel Cooke, Constantin W. Arnscheidt, Roger Cremades, Carla Z. Cremer, Victor Galaz, Ajay Gambhir, Katie Heikkinen, Michael Hinge, Daniel Hoyer, Florian U. Jehn, Paul Larcey, Luke Kemp, Patrick W. Keys, Emad Kiyaei, Steven J. Lade, David Manheim, David A. McKay, Divya Pandey, Tom Pegram, Viktoria Spaiser, Kolfinna Tómasdóttir, Peter Turchin, Saskia E. Werners, Mark Workman, Nico Wunderling, Hiromi Yamashita, William J. Sutherland

Abstract

Summary based on the authors’ preprint. The study uses expert elicitation and horizon scanning to prioritize emerging or overlooked threats that could cause global catastrophes. It examines how disruptions can cascade across systems, how threats can interact, and how social and political conditions shape risk. The authors discuss how these findings can inform prevention, mitigation, and adaptation.

Journal

One Earth

Publication Details

pp. 101873

Cite This Publication

Dal Prá, G., Chan, C. Y. C., Burkhanov, T., Cooke, N., Arnscheidt, C. W., Cremades, R., Cremer, C. Z., Galaz, V., Gambhir, A., Heikkinen, K., Hinge, M., Hoyer, D., Jehn, F. U., Larcey, P., Kemp, L., Keys, P. W., Kiyaei, E., Lade, S. J., Manheim, D., … Sutherland, W. J. (2026). A horizon scan of global catastrophic risks. One Earth, Article 101873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2026.101873

Connections

Related work

Book

The Great Holocene Transformation

Sep 17, 2025Turchin, P.

What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies

Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states? During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological…

Beresta BooksSocial ComplexityCooperation
Book

End Times

Jun 13, 2023Turchin, P.

Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a…

Penguin PressStructural-Demographic TheoryElites and Inequality
Book

Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History

Nov 17, 2020Turchin, P., Hoyer, D.

Discover the world records that define our history and jump headfirst into the past using scientific data that reveals accurate and insightful answers to life’s biggest questions.

What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world…

PublicAffairsHistorical DatabasesCliodynamics
Book

Ages of Discord

Oct 2, 2016Turchin, P.

A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History

The real wage of a US worker today is less than it was 40 years ago—but there are four times as many multimillionaires. As inequality grows, the politics become more poisonous. Every year, more and more Americans go on shooting sprees, killing strangers and passers-by—and now, increasingly, representatives of the state. Troubling trends of this kind are…

Beresta BooksPolitical InstabilityStructural-Demographic Theory
Book

Ultrasociety

Nov 17, 2015Turchin, P.

Cooperation is powerful

We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings—overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants—in the last 10,000 years. Genetic…

Beresta BooksCooperationCultural Evolution
Book

Secular Cycles

Aug 9, 2009Turchin, P., Nefedov, S. A.

Unraveling the dynamics of History through Demographic, Economic, and Political Shifts in Agrarian Societies

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial…

Princeton University PressStructural-Demographic TheoryStates and Empires