World Problems
Ranked by priority score. Click any problem to explore research, review community drafts, and contribute your own.
Global Health & Disease
Preventable diseases kill millions annually. Malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases disproportionately affect the global poor despite cost-effective interventions existing.
Engineered Pandemics & Bioweapons
Advances in synthetic biology lower the barrier to creating novel pathogens. A deliberately engineered pandemic could kill hundreds of millions and destabilize civilization.
Factory Farming & Animal Welfare
Over 80 billion land animals are raised in factory farms annually under conditions of severe suffering. Alternative proteins and welfare reforms offer tractable near-term interventions.
Catastrophic AI Misuse
AI systems used deliberately by state or non-state actors for mass casualties via cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, autonomous weapons, or supercharged bioweapon design.
Power-Seeking AI Systems
Advanced AI systems may develop instrumental goals around self-preservation and resource acquisition, undermining human oversight and potentially leading to irreversible loss of control.
Wild Animal Suffering
The majority of sentient life on Earth consists of wild animals who face suffering from predation, disease, starvation, and parasitism. Interventions exist but remain highly controversial.
Moral Status of Digital Minds
As AI and emulated minds grow in sophistication, the question of whether they deserve moral consideration becomes pressing. Failure to recognize digital sentience could be an enormous moral catastrophe.
S-Risks (Suffering Risks)
Scenarios where the long-run future contains vast amounts of suffering rather than flourishing — including scenarios with digital minds in negative hedonic states, or stable dystopias locked in by powerful AI.
Extreme Power Concentration via AI
AI could enable unprecedented concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a small group — a corporation, government, or individual — foreclosing pluralistic futures.
Gradual AI-Driven Disempowerment
Rather than a sudden takeover, humans may gradually cede decision-making to AI systems in ways that are individually rational but collectively undermine human agency and democratic governance.
AI-Enhanced Decision Making Failures
AI systems advising or making high-stakes decisions in healthcare, criminal justice, and infrastructure may encode biases, fail catastrophically on distribution shift, or be misused by bad actors.
Great Power Conflict
Military competition between major powers, especially around AI and nuclear weapons, raises the risk of catastrophic war. AI-accelerated decision cycles and autonomous weapons lower the threshold for escalation.
Climate Change & Ecological Collapse
Climate change poses serious risks to billions through extreme weather, sea level rise, agricultural disruption, and ecosystem collapse. While well-studied, implementation of solutions remains critically underfunded.
Space Governance & Long-Run Futures
As humanity expands into space, governance frameworks for resource extraction, colonization, and conflict resolution are being established now. Early decisions may lock in structures for millennia.
Extreme Poverty & Economic Inequality
Over 700 million people survive on less than $2.15 per day, facing chronic malnutrition, exclusion from healthcare, and intergenerational poverty traps. Evidence-backed cash transfers and economic empowerment programs have proven highly cost-effective.
Global Hunger & Food Security
Nearly 750 million people face severe food insecurity, and 3.1 billion cannot afford a nutritious diet. Hunger and malnutrition impair cognitive development, immune function, and economic productivity on a massive scale.
Clean Water & Sanitation
2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water, and 3.5 billion lack safe sanitation. Contaminated water and poor sanitation cause 1.4 million preventable deaths annually, primarily from diarrheal disease in young children.
Mental Health Crisis
Mental health disorders are the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting 970 million people. Depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy $1 trillion annually in lost productivity, yet mental health receives less than 2% of health budgets.
Nuclear Weapons & Disarmament
The world's ~12,500 nuclear warheads pose an existential threat to civilization. A large exchange between major powers could trigger nuclear winter, kill hundreds of millions directly, and collapse global food systems for years.
Biodiversity Loss & Ecosystem Collapse
Species are going extinct 1,000× faster than background rates due to habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. Ecosystem collapse threatens agricultural stability, water systems, and the natural systems that support all life.
Forced Displacement & Refugee Crisis
Over 120 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes by conflict, persecution, and climate change — the highest number in recorded history. Displaced populations face acute vulnerability to violence, disease, statelessness, and intergenerational poverty.
Antimicrobial Resistance
Antimicrobial resistance erodes the effectiveness of the antibiotics that underpin modern medicine, causing millions of deaths annually. A broken antibiotic-development market and the evolutionary inevitability of resistance make it a slow-burn, hard-to-solve global threat.
Biological Aging & Longevity
Biological aging is the shared upstream driver of most chronic disease and death, yet directly targeting the aging process — rather than individual diseases — remains scientifically immature with no proven human interventions.
Loneliness & Social Isolation
Loneliness and social isolation are a widespread, under-recognized driver of premature death and chronic disease, affecting roughly one in six people worldwide. The space lacks dedicated funding and proven scalable interventions.
Falling Fertility & Demographic Collapse
Global fertility has fallen below replacement for the first time in human history, with roughly 70% of people living in below-replacement countries — foreshadowing aging populations, shrinking workforces, and eventual depopulation. The trend is real but slow-moving and policy-resistant.
Microplastics & PFAS Pollution
Synthetic microplastics and PFAS "forever chemicals" now contaminate water, food, soil, and human bodies worldwide, with detectable PFAS in the blood of nearly the entire population and growing but still uncertain evidence of chronic health harm.
Democratic Backsliding
Democracy has declined globally for nearly two decades, with autocracies now outnumbering democracies and the majority of humanity living under autocratic rule — weakening rights, raising conflict and corruption risk, and degrading collective capacity to solve other global problems.
Road Traffic Injuries
Road traffic crashes kill roughly 1.19 million people every year and are the single leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29, with 92% of deaths in low- and middle-income countries despite known, low-cost prevention.
Air Pollution
Ambient and household air pollution together cause roughly 6.7 million premature deaths a year (~12% of global deaths) from heart disease, stroke, COPD, lung cancer, and child respiratory infections, with the burden concentrated in low- and middle-income countries.
Maternal & Newborn Mortality
About 260,000 women and 2.3 million newborns die each year from largely preventable causes around pregnancy and childbirth, concentrated in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Cheap, evidence-backed interventions exist, but the space is comparatively crowded with major funders.
Snakebite Envenoming
Snakebite envenoming causes an estimated 81,000–138,000 deaths and roughly 250,000–400,000 permanent disabilities or amputations each year, concentrated among impoverished rural populations. Effective antivenoms exist, but chronic underfunding and poor distribution leave most victims untreated.
Cardiometabolic & Non-Communicable Disease
Cardiometabolic and other non-communicable diseases — heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers, chronic respiratory disease — are the leading cause of death worldwide, killing roughly 43 million people a year, increasingly concentrated in low- and middle-income countries with weak chronic-care systems.
Ocean Acidification
Rising atmospheric CO2 is lowering ocean pH, threatening shell-forming organisms, coral reefs, fisheries, and the coastal economies that depend on them. In 2025 it became the seventh planetary boundary to be breached, yet it remains overshadowed by climate warming.
Soil Degradation & Land Loss
Human-induced soil degradation and land loss are eroding the planet's productive land base — at least 100 million hectares of healthy land lost annually and roughly 40% of land degraded — threatening food security and ecosystem services for over a billion people.