I am the Lib Dem PPC for Dartford in the upcoming general election, and, like candidates up and down the country, my campaign is being dominated by local issues. This is right and proper, a good MP can make their constituents’ lives better in so many ways, and for most voters, the key issues are always going to be the things that affect them directly.
However, in my day job, I am also a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, an academic institute that studies, and tries to prevent, human extinction level threats. As academic institutes go, we are naturally very keen to produce work that is relevant to policy makers and to communicate what we do as widely as possible, and not just to other academics. However, standing for election makes me acutely aware of just how narrow the circle of people who we communicate with actually is.
Threats to the survival of humanity are real and present, and should any of them come to pass the loss would be incalculably great. We face challenges from dangers that are well known, such as climate change and nuclear war, and others that can appear more speculative, such as global pandemics and Artificial Intelligence. Most importantly, there are things that we can do right now to substantially reduce these risks, if only we could motivate politicians and others to take them into account when making policy.
Many of these are obvious. We need to implement ambitious targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. We need to work with international organisations to solve global problems. We need to achieve global nuclear disarmament as quickly as possible.
We also need to protect ourselves from pandemics and achieve global health security by investing in the healthcare systems of countries that are most likely to be the source of new killer pathogens and least able to cope with any new outbreak. And we should be working to improve humanity’s ability to respond to all manner of global challenges by ending child malnutrition and malaria, which together do so much to hold back the creative potential of our species.
The truth is that none of these policies is that costly, especially when compared to the cost of leaving these kinds of threat unchecked, and many are beneficial in other ways as well. A mere 2-3% of developed countries GDP* – equivalent to the amounts that people were willing to risk through leaving the EU – could secure humanity’s survival for many generations, and help us to reach a point of technological development where these things no longer threaten us.
We don’t do enough to implement such policies, in part, because spending such sums on long-term protection from intangible threats can seem like an electoral liability when there are so many immediate concerns that dominate our lives and when our sights seldom go beyond the next election cycle. It’s hard to win an election by making pessimistic predictions about the future. However, governments will not take these risks seriously until they feel that they can respond to them without risking electoral failure as a result. We need to raise our sights and work together to ensure a safer, fairer world for our descendants.
So, while my campaign this time will feature all the potholes and library closures that one would expect from any honest Lib Dem, I am determined to begin talking about these issues as well – we have to!
* Naturally this figure is a rough estimate. It includes: 1% of GDP to mitigate extreme climate change, as recommended by the Stern review, 0.7% GDP to tackle global poverty, channelled towards the most effective methods of improving public health and alleviating extreme poverty as recommended by effective altruists such as GiveWell, 0.3% GDP to prepare for, and prevent, natural disasters, including global catastrophes and additional funds to support international organisations that coordinate action on global challenges, such as the IPCC, IAEA, WHO and UNFPA, and further research into the identification and mitigation of existential risks and global catastrophes.
For more about existential risks, and how to avoid them, see the 2016 Global Catastrophic Risk report .
* Simon Beard is a Quaker, a Philosophy student and a Lib Dem from Sevenoaks