Why public health needs to engage with Existential Risk Studies: a call for collaboration

Abstract

Existential and global catastrophic risks are low-probability, high-impact threats with profound implications for population health and health equity, yet they remain largely outside mainstream public health activities. This article introduces Existential Risk Studies (ERS) as an emerging interdisciplinary field that analyses existential and global catastrophic risks as a unified class of problems, spanning exogenous risks (such as supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and stellar phenomena) and endogenous risks (including nuclear war, pandemics, rapid and severe climate change, and advanced artificial intelligence). It surveys the key ERS risk domains, highlighting their potential to generate extensive morbidity and mortality worldwide, their tendency to amplify existing social and economic inequalities, and their interactions and cascading effects within tightly coupled biophysical and socio-political systems. The article then argues that ERS and public health share core aims – protecting the health of populations and reducing health inequities – and that the current separation between them constitutes a missed opportunity. It calls for closer collaboration between ERS and public health as a way to strengthen health system resilience and global preparedness while reinforcing the foundational mission of public health in an increasingly risky world.