List of the most urgent global issues
These scores were made in 2017, and haven’t been kept up-to-date after then. To see our current overall views on which global problems are most pressing, see the problem profiles page.
This page shows a rough attempt to quantitatively compare global problems using our framework, but isn’t the only input into how we pick issues.
Which global issues should you work on to have the greatest impact?
Working with researchers at the Global Priorities Institute, Open Philanthropy and elsewhere, we created a framework and used it to rate and make a list of global issues.
This led to some surprising results – artificial intelligence ranks as more pressing than global health.
This is because the most urgent problems are not only big, they’re also neglected and solvable – the fewer people working on a problem, the easier it is to make a big contribution. An issue can be big but comparatively well-known and crowded, like climate change, or it can be small but neglected, like land use zoning reform, and therefore also worth considering.
If you want to get the full story, this article explains how we came to focus on neglected catastrophic risks, and this article explains how our broad views have changed over time. But for now, here’s the current list. It’s still very much a work in progress, and we expect it to change over the coming years.
The list of global issues
Please take these scores with a big pinch of salt. Some of the scores were last updated in 2016. We think some of them could easily be wrong by a couple of points, and we think the scores may be too spread out.
| Problem | Recommendation | Scale(?) | Neglect- edness(?) | Solvability(?) | Total Score (?) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Risks from artificial intelligence | Recommended | 15 | 8 | 4 | 27 |
| Promoting effective altruism | Recommended | 13 | 9 | 4 | 26 |
| Global priorities research | Recommended | 13 | 9 | 4 | 26 |
| Improving institutional decision-making | Recommended | 13 | 7 | 4 | 24 |
| Factory farming | Sometimes recommended | 13 | 6 | 4 | 23 |
| Biosecurity | Sometimes recommended | 15 | 4 | 4 | 23 |
| Nuclear security | Sometimes recommended | 15 | 5 | 3 | 23 |
| Developing world health | Sometimes recommended | 13 | 2 | 6 | 21 |
| Climate change (extreme risks) | Sometimes recommended | 14 | 2 | 4 | 20 |
| Land use reform | Sometimes recommended | 9 | 7 | 4 | 20 |
| Smoking in the developing world | Sometimes recommended | 12 | 5 | 3 | 20 |
Click through to see our reasoning for each problem.
One point higher means the problem is roughly three times as pressing, though this is highly approximate. See the full detail on how we did the ratings.
This tool re-ranks the list based on your answers to a couple of key questions.
Which global issue should you work on?
To see our all things considered views on which world problems most urgently need more people to work on them, go here.
You can also read more about the arguments for and against focusing on catastrophic risks here.
Read nextHow can you make the greatest contribution to solving a problem?
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