CharitiesFounders Pledge: Global Catastrophic Risks Fund
Founders Pledge: Global Catastrophic Risks Fund
Fund

Founders Pledge

Global Catastrophic Risks Fund

The Global Catastrophic Risks Fund aims to reduce global catastrophic risks by granting to promising projects

Reducing global catastrophic risks
Figure

What problem is the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund working on?

Humanity faces large and growing risks, including war between great powers, nuclear war, risks from artificial intelligence, catastrophic biological risks, and emerging threats. The Global Catastrophic Risks Fund identifies and funds interventions to reduce the largest known risks to humanity today.

What projects does the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund support?

This Fund is designed to both tackle far-future threats, and to take action now and help protect every human being alive today. In particular, this Fund aims to:

  • Reduce the probability of large-scale catastrophic events.
  • Mitigate the potential negative impacts of these events.
  • Improve our ability to anticipate new and emerging risks on the horizon.

Recent past recipients of grants from the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund include:

  • SecureBio - supporting work developing technologies and policies that protect the world against extreme biological risks
  • Center for a New American Security - incubating policy research project on AI crisis preparedness
  • Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security - supporting a multi-year research and advocacy effort to ensure pandemic-proof PPE in the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile
  • Blueprint Biosecurity - supporting the 2024 Southeast Asia Pandemic-Proof PPE Workshop
  • INHR - supporting for U.S.-China diplomatic dialogues on artificial intelligence
  • Global Shield - seed funding to launch the organization

See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations are allocated, past recipients, the latest annual Fund reports, and plans for the future.

Unsure how a fund is different from a charity? See our page about why we recommend donors give to funds.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund?1.

We previously included the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund on our list of recommendations because it is managed by the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our evaluator investigations and chosen to rely on; as such, we don't currently include the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.