Global Shield Briefing (April 2026)
Policy trade-offs, and governance systems for the 21st century
The latest policy, research and news on global catastrophic risk (GCR).
Global catastrophic risk can be viewed from various perspectives – economic, security, technological, scientific, environmental, humanitarian, ethical. Ultimately, it is challenge for governance. How do political leaders think, decide and govern in, and for, a deteriorating risk environment? This month’s briefing explores this question.
Inside Global Shield
Updates on Global Shield’s work and team.
United States
Global Shield US is tracking the latest developments of the Farm Bill – a piece of legislation covering food, agricultural and nutritional policies typically reauthorized every five years, but which has received one-year extensions for the past three years. In March, the House Agriculture Committee sent a bill to the floor, but the prospects of the Farm Bill passing in this session of Congress are slim. We continue to advocate for policies that would increase the US food system’s preparedness and security to catastrophic threats, and will support the adoption of policies under the Administration’s “Farm Security is National Security” agenda in furtherance of these goals.
Australia
Global Shield Australia welcomed the release of the Independent Review into Australia’s Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act. This Act is a key legal framework governing Australia’s critical infrastructure sector. The Independent Review made a number of recommendations aligned with Global Shield’s submission, including in relation to considering artificial intelligence (AI) risk and clarifying emergency response powers. Global Shield will also engage as part of Australian Government consultations aimed at enhancing government powers for handling major critical infrastructure incidents.
Under the lens
A closer look at a GCR policy matter.
The policy trade-offs for global catastrophic risk reduction
Global catastrophic risk researchers have conducted the first systematic study of what locations are most resilient to a range of global catastrophic threats. According to the review, no country is resilient against all kinds of global catastrophic risk. As the authors state, “There is truly no place to hide.” Australia and New Zealand were the most resilient across the widest range of scenarios but still remained vulnerable to some scenarios due to their integration in global trade systems.
Four factors were most critical for resilience to GCR: geographic isolation, self-sufficiency of critical goods like food, governance quality, and decentralisation of governance and infrastructure. The authors state that, “Of these, governance quality and decentralisation stand out as both modifiable through policy and largely free of cross-GCR trade-offs.” But they assess that these factors are currently trending in the wrong direction, given that “Democracies are in decline globally…Inequality is rising for the majority of the world’s population…[and] Supply chains are increasingly concentrated and globalised”.
Policy comment: Reducing global catastrophic risk can cause difficult trade-offs for policymakers. Not only does it compete for attention and resources with public priorities like health and education, it struggles against salient threats like terrorism and natural disasters. Further, as the study details, some GCR policies might have countervailing impacts depending on the scenario. For example, centralized governance systems can support crisis response and national mobilization, but can create single points of failure and foster poor local resilience.
Governments must therefore consider a range of policy options for tackling global catastrophic risk based on their costs, benefits and cross-portfolio impacts. They should prioritize policies that will face little trade-offs or create co-benefits across threat domains and policy issues. These interventions include: building state capacity; increasing social cohesion and community-level resilience; decentralizing food and energy supply chains; near-shoring or onshoring domestic production; protecting and decentralizing infrastructure; and increasing public risk communication and awareness. Such policies would help reduce catastrophic risk while providing a range of positive externalities for social and economic goals.
A governance system for the 21st century
The Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor has released its 2026 edition. It notes that the number of warheads available for military use increased in 2025 for the ninth consecutive year, reaching an estimated 9,745 – an increase of 141 warheads from the previous year and a continuation of a trend that started in 2017. A total of 99 countries are now parties or signatories to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The total number of states opposed remained at 44.
The World Meteorological Organization has released its State of the Global Climate 2025. It states that “The past three years are the three warmest years in the 176‑year combined land and ocean observational record.” Eight of the ten most negative annual glacier mass balances since 1950 have occurred since 2016, with the ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland having lost significant mass since satellite records began. Furthermore, ocean heat content reached the highest level in the 66-year observational record, with the rate of ocean warming over the past two decades being more than twice that observed over the period 1960-2005.
The second edition of the International AI Safety Report was released in February. It covers the increasing capability of AI for malicious use – including influence and manipulation campaigns and criminal activity using AI-generated content, cyberattacks, and biological and chemical weapons development – as well as the systemic risk from labor market impacts and human autonomy. It also found that “since the last Report, it has become more common for models to distinguish between test settings and real-world deployment and to find loopholes in evaluations, which could allow dangerous capabilities to go undetected before deployment.”
Policy comment: These reports have little overlap, but they point to one overarching message: global risk is worsening and with no immediate reversal in sight. Reading these reports together indicates that the world seems to have entered a new risk paradigm in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It therefore raises a key question for policymakers: How fit are governance systems for the 21st-century risk environment? The way governments have operated in the past might not be sufficient for the coming decades. Core assumptions of governing might need to be overturned. For example: long planning horizons for infrastructure and defense investments; slow policy-making and regulatory processes; the siloing of expertise and policy areas; implicit legitimacy and trust in democratic processes; fiscal capacity and time to recover from a crisis; a web of international institutions, rules, norms and partners. The modern risk landscape forces governments to re-imagine how they make decisions, allocate budgets, engage citizens, and respond to global shocks.
On the radar
Upcoming events and activities that we are tracking.
Food security
The conflict in the Middle East is disrupting supply of critical agricultural inputs, especially fuel and fertilizer. For example, both production and shipping of urea, the primary fertilizer for staples like wheat and rice, has been cut and prices have escalated just as the Northern Hemisphere spring planting season begins. The second and third-order impacts – yield losses, herd liquidation, feed cost inflation, food shortages, political instability – are likely to take years to manifest.
Defense conferences
Two upcoming conferences – the London Defence Conference at Whitehall and the Stockholm Civil Defence Forum – provide an opportunity for Global Shield NATO to engage with key government and industry stakeholders on NATO Article 3 and the 1.5% Hague Summit commitment.
Non-proliferation
The 2026 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (RevCon) is taking place at the UN HQ in New York from April 27 to May 22. The Preparatory Committees of 2023, 2024 and 2025 failed to agree on any consensus recommendations. The 2026 RevCon is likely to be highly contested given the geopolitical dynamics, current conflicts, and growing support for TPNW among non-nuclear states.
UR26 call for proposals
The Understanding Risk Global Forum 2026 (UR26), taking place in Abu Dhabi from 19–23 October 2026, is calling for proposals to share insights, innovations, and research on disaster risk resilience. This year’s themes include AI, preparedness, response and future-ready systems, and the disaster-conflict nexus. Submissions close 30 April.
This briefing is a product of Global Shield, the world’s first and only advocacy organization dedicated to reducing global catastrophic risk of all hazards. With each briefing, we aim to build the most knowledgeable audience in the world when it comes to reducing global catastrophic risk. We want to show that action is not only needed, it’s possible. Help us build this community of motivated individuals, researchers, advocates and policymakers by sharing this briefing with your networks.