Special Seminar – Goodwin Gibbins (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford)

Climate Change, Existential Risk and Longtermist Philanthropy

What happens when philanthropists interested in the long-term flourishing of humanity examine climate change as a risk? What questions do they ask and what answers do we have for them?
Climate change receives a lot of popular attention as a potential existential risk to humanity. Yet there is a community of philosophers and philanthropists explicitly focusing on mitigating such risks, and for them climate change doesn’t always register as a priority. Climate science has focused on building a rigorous case about the reality of climate change as a threat and its most likely trajectory, but has only a limited exploration of worst cases, in part because of the deep uncertainty involved. This creates a conundrum for funders, who are often trying to optimally direct money between cause areas with very different risk profiles. In this talk, we will discuss the kinds of questions this existential risk perspective raises about climate change – the science, the relationship to the human system, and the possible interventions.

Questions? Constantin Arnscheidt