Global Dangers

Analyses some of the new issues that are raising the temperature of contemporary world politics. Environmental scarcity, international migration and nationalism.

A Global Catastrophic Risk is one that has the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale. This book focuses on such risks arising from natural catastrophes (Earth-based or beyond), nuclear war, terrorism, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and social collapse.

Command of the commons : the military foundation of U.S. Hegemony / Barry R. Posen / - Why do states build nuclear weapons? Three models in search of a bomb / Scott D. Sagan / - Never say never again : nuclear reversal revisited / Ariel E. Levite / - Preventing nuclear entrepreneurship in russia's nuclear cities / Sharon K. Weiner / - Pathogens as weapons : the international security implications of biological warfare / Gregory Koblentz / - Dreaded risks and the control of biological weapons / Jessica Stern / - Beyond the MTCR : building a comprehensive regime to contain ballistic missile proliferation / Dinshaw Mistry / - Human security : paradigm shift or hot air? / Roland Paris / - Security, stability, and international migration / Myron Weiner / - HIV / AIDS and the changing landscape of war in Africa / Stefan Elbe / - Collateral damage : humanitarian assistance as a cause of conflict / Sarah Kenyon Lischer / - Market civilization and its clash with terror / Michael Mouusseau / - T ...

This publication is a comprehensive assessment of leading risks to global health. It provides detailed global and regional estimates of premature mortality, disability and loss of health attributable to 24 global risk factors.--Publisher's description.

Providing an up-to-date synthesis of all knowledge relevant to the climate change issue, this book ranges from the basic science documenting the need for policy action to the technologies, economic instruments and political strategies that can be employed in response to climate change. Ethical and cultural issues constraining the societal response to climate change are also discussed. This book provides a handbook for those who want to understand and contribute to meeting this challenge. It covers a very wide range of disciplines - core biophysical sciences involved with climate change (geosciences, atmospheric sciences, ocean sciences, ecology/biology) as well as economics, political science, health sciences, institutions and governance, sociology, ethics and philosophy, and engineering. As such it will be invaluable for a wide range of researchers and professionals wanting a cutting-edge synthesis of climate change issues, and for advanced student courses on climate change.

As the culminating volume in the DCP3 series, volume 9 will provide an overview of DCP3 findings and methods, a summary of messages and substantive lessons to be taken from DCP3, and a further discussion of cross-cutting and synthesizing topics across the first eight volumes. The introductory chapters (1-3) in this volume take as their starting point the elements of the Essential Packages presented in the overview chapters of each volume. First, the chapter on intersectoral policy priorities for health includes fiscal and intersectoral policies and assembles a subset of the population policies and applies strict criteria for a low-income setting in order to propose a "highest-priority" essential package. Second, the chapter on packages of care and delivery platforms for universal health coverage (UHC) includes health sector interventions, primarily clinical and public health services, and uses the same approach to propose a highest priority package of interventions and policies that meet similar criteria, provides cost estimates, and describes a pathway to UHC.

Conventional wisdom among policymakers in both the US and Europe holds that weak and failing states are the source of the world's most pressing security threats today. However, as this book shows, our assumptions about the threats posed by failed and failing states are based on false premises.

The concept of risk in global life has not been fully understood and explored and this book attempts to examine what it entails in the fast changing, interconnected and complex world. As a foundational component of safety systems, risk has been considered relatively simple, predictable, and therefore, assessable and manageable phenomenon. Social and political sciences prefer the terminology of security to capture the dimension of risk which is more complex and more consequential to survival. Risk has become more human-made and intentional today, and this book explores innovative approaches and engages in theoretical and policy debates to capture its political and security dimensions.