Abstract
A new official Draft Long-term Insights Briefing (LTIB) is a timely and well-argued call to shift hazard management from reactive to proactive. It usefully covers such hazards as earthquakes, tsunami, local volcanic activity, severe weather, and space weather like solar storms.
However, the LTIB neglects important global catastrophic risks that could completely overwhelm domestic response capacity. One such risk arises from artificial intelligence which could cause a range of catastrophes, including from bioengineered pandemics. It also omits global sun-blocking catastrophes that could arise from nuclear winter scenarios or large volcanic eruptions such as the "year without a summer" from the Tambora eruption in 1815. These sun-blocking catastrophes could threaten population food security, especially when combined with major trade disruptions, for example a lack of imported liquid fuel after nuclear war.
Fortunately, there are a range of preventive measures and resiliency building measures that the Government can still explore.