Founders Pledge
Global Catastrophic Risks Fund
The Founders Pledge Global Catastrophic Risks Fund supports highly impactful solutions to help prevent the most severe global catastrophes.
What problem is the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund working on?
Humanity faces large and growing risks, including war between great powers, nuclear war, risks from artificial intelligence, catastrophic biological risks, and emerging threats. The Global Catastrophic Risks Fund identifies and funds interventions to reduce the largest known risks to humanity today.
What projects does the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund support?
This Fund is designed to both tackle far-future threats, and to take action now and help protect every human being alive today. In particular, this Fund aims to:
- Reduce the probability of large-scale catastrophic events.
- Mitigate the potential negative impacts of these events.
- Improve our ability to anticipate new and emerging risks on the horizon.
Its grantmaking will take a balanced approach to existential and catastrophic risks. See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations will be allocated (starting in 2023) and plans for the future.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund?
We previously included the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund on our list of recommendations because it is managed by the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only funds managed by grantmakers we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; while we expect to soon look into Founders Pledge as part of this more in-depth evaluator research, we haven’t yet. As such, we don't currently include this fund as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.