AI Among 17 'Catastrophic Threats' Requiring Urgent Global Action, Researchers Warn

A commission of thirty-five leaders from across industry, government, and academia has identified seventeen interconnected threats to human health and survival that could unfold across the remainder of this century. Their analysis, published in The Lancet and grounded in data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease study, forecasts that these threats could collectively strip tens of billions of years of healthy life from the global population through sickness, disability, and premature death. But the researchers emphasize a crucial counterpoint: the worst outcomes are not inevitable. Targeted action by world leaders today can still alter the trajectory.

The threats span a wide terrain. Some are behavioral and medical—obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, mental illness. Others are structural: economic instability, environmental degradation, technological disruption, and armed conflict. What unites them is that each one is both severe and theoretically addressable through deliberate intervention. The commission did not rank them by severity but rather identified them as a cluster of dangers that interact and amplify one another, with the heaviest burden falling on the world's most vulnerable populations.

Two threats stand apart because they carry the possibility of human extinction. One is nuclear conflict. The other is the malicious deployment of artificial intelligence. The AI risk remains largely theoretical—no catastrophic AI event of truly global scale has yet occurred—which is why estimates diverge widely among forecasters. Yet the commission notes that the rapid emergence of powerful AI systems itself demonstrates how quickly assumptions about stability can collapse. The same lesson emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Africa, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. The potential loss of healthy life years due to malicious AI is estimated at approximately 10.4 billion worldwide by 2100, comparable to the toll projected from naturally occurring pandemics and from obesity.

Obesity offers a useful contrast. Unlike AI risk, obesity's dangers rest on solid empirical ground. Data shows that overweight and obesity are rising in every country on Earth. If current trends hold, researchers project that sixty percent of adults and one-third of children globally will be overweight or obese by 2050. Obesity connects to dozens of other health failures, particularly through increased caloric intake and decreased physical activity. The commission forecasts this cluster of behavioral risks will produce a major global health impact.

Dr. Christopher Murray, co-chair of the commission and director of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, framed the central finding this way: humanity still possesses the agency to act. The decisions made by leaders in the present will shape the health and wellbeing of the next generation. But delay carries a cost—it does not eliminate the problem; it merely shifts and compounds it into the future.

The commission identified eight factors that will determine how effectively societies respond to these threats. Trust emerged as foundational, described as a stabilizing force that allows societies to anticipate, mitigate, and adapt. Distrust, by contrast, increases potential harm. The other seven factors include collaborative global leadership, resilient food systems, and efforts to build more equitable societies. The report notes that public health history is littered with cases in which threats were known and protection plans existed, yet effective action never materialized. Meaningful progress will require not only technical solutions but also robust societal and institutional foundations capable of fostering genuine collaboration and accountability.

Dr. Natalia Kanem, former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund and co-chair of the commission, underscored that recent global events have shown how rapidly stability can give way to crisis, and how expensive it becomes to respond only after disaster has struck. Yet she also insisted that the future is not predetermined. Governments and communities must act decisively now to protect health and construct a fairer, more peaceful, and more secure world for coming generations. The commission's work is not intended to rank threats but to catalyze action at international, regional, and national levels.