Exploring futures for the science of global risk

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of a dedicated community working to understand and mitigate the risk of global disasters (global risk). This community faces an uncertain future with key challenges emerging from the diversification of perspectives and theories of change within it and the growing frequency and intensity of global crises. This paper presents a collaborative exercise exploring divergent futures for the field using a participatory narrative futures method, ParEvo. It considered near-term possibilities for global risk and how this community might respond to it. We begin by setting out the nature of the global risk community and the background to this exercise. Next, we present the method used, the participants involved, how they collaboratively constructed narrative futures, and the evaluation and textual analysis by which these were interpreted. We briefly present key results, including summaries of the completed narratives and their evaluation by participants and focused analysis of three core themes: conflict and rapprochement, agents of change, and outcomes and impacts. Finally, we discuss the exercise’s limitations and challenges and present lessons for both the application of ParEvo and similar futures tools (including using participatory exercise design and improved evaluation of contributions) and the global risk community (including the need for conflict resolution, planning for how researchers interact with actual global risk, and reflection on what the community aims to achieve). Full results from the exercise are presented in supplementary material and all the contributions made by participants can be found at https://parevo.org/exercise/exploring-futures-for-a-science-of-global-risk.