Every five years, the parties to the NPT come together for what is known as a Review Conference, in which they assess progress toward these three pillars and discuss ways to strengthen the treaty. The NPT RevCon, as it is known, is one of the major multilateral conferences on nuclear security, and it is taking place at the UN from April 27 to May 22.

Joining me to discuss the significance of this NPT Review Conference is Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association. We kick off with a discussion of the NPT itself and its impact over the decades, and then have a long conversation about the key storylines, diplomatic intrigues, and policy debates that will unfold over the next three weeks at the UN. Consider this episode your curtain-raiser for the most important global gathering on nuclear security of the past five years.

This episode is freely available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get podcasts.

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A few notes: This episode is produced in partnership with Ploughshares, a foundation committed to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear threats. I’ll have a follow-up episode at the end of the conference discussing what exactly happened during the NPT RevCon.

Also, I’ll be attending much of the RevCon in person. I’ll be serving as something of a “pool reporter,” covering this conference in support of dozens of international journalists who report on nuclear security issues and feeding them news and insights from the confab.This project is backed by the Stanley Center for Peace and Security Developing Story Project, an initiative to support, strengthen, and sustain reporting on nuclear weapons and related issues. I’m looking forward to this.

If you are around the UN, say hi. And be sure to follow our new Global Dispatches WhatsApp Channel for updates from the RevCon and other happenings around the world of the UN.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Kelsey, we are speaking just at the start of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, and we’ll unpack what that means. But to kick off, can I have you explain to the audience what is the NPT, and how does it work?

Kelsey Davenport: The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty really is designed to do three things that form the bedrock of the broader non-proliferation and arms control regime.

First, it commits the states that had tested nuclear weapons prior to the negotiation of the treaty — So, the United States, the Soviet Union, now Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France, to halt the arms race and engage in negotiations on the elimination of nuclear weapons. So, essentially, it commits them to nuclear disarmament. The second aspect of the treaty is that it commits all countries that joined the treaty that did not possess nuclear weapons to refrain from developing or acquiring nuclear weapons.

So, that’s really the nonproliferation component. And it was the primary driver of the negotiations on the NPT. The United States and the Soviet Union were both concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons. And then the third aspect is that the treaty guarantees that states that join can still access nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, provided they put those programs under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. So, those are really what are referred to as the three pillars of the NPT — nuclear arms control and disarmament, nuclear nonproliferation, and access to nuclear technology for peaceful uses.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And big picture, since 1970, how has the NPT fared?

Kelsey Davenport: The NPT has been remarkably successful, particularly in preventing the spread of new nuclear-armed states. As a result of the negotiation of the NPT, a number of countries that were interested in developing nuclear weapons, that had pursued nuclear weapons-relevant research, renounced those programs and joined the treaty. The treaty has proved successful in terms of giving the IAEA access to countries, which has been detected when there has been illicit nuclear activities ongoing.

You know, the Iraq WMD program, for instance, demonstrated the importance of these types of safeguards. And the treaty has facilitated access to critical nuclear technologies that countries are using for a range of civil purposes — everything from power to the development of medical isotopes. But it’s also not without controversy. Particularly in the last decade or so, a lot of the non-nuclear weapon states have been critical of the nuclear weapon states for failing to meet their disarmament commitments, when we saw throughout the Cold War and after the Cold War, the United States and Russia in particular take significant steps to cut the size of their nuclear arsenals.

All of which was consistent with the goals of the NPT. But that progress has reversed. And now we are seeing all of the nuclear-armed states investing in new nuclear delivery systems, and some countries even expanding their nuclear arsenals. So, that period of success is now being questioned as states really are examining whether the NPT provides security benefits and whether it can actually facilitate nuclear disarmament.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And I think possibly that brings us to the review conference that kicks off at the UN, which is the opportunity for states parties to the nonproliferation treaty to review progress against the treaty and also chart a path forward to potentially strengthen it. What are some of the big issues you see coming into this RevCon? And I suppose, again, big picture, what is the significance of this particular Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference?

Kelsey Davenport: This review conference is extremely significant because it comes at a time when nuclear norms and the broader nonproliferation and disarmament architecture is under attack on multiple fronts. And, to be honest, looking at this review conference, it’s hard to see what set of issues will not be contentious and controversial. Another thing I think that’s worth noting is that this review conference comes after the previous two review conferences failed to adopt a consensus final document. And the consensus final document generally contains actions that states commit to taking to further advance the goals and objectives of the treaty.

A final document is not the only measure of success of an NPT Review Conference, but a lot of states put premium on the adoption of this document to set a roadmap for how to ensure continued implementation of the treaty. And the president of the review conference has stated that he wants to see a final consensus document adopted. But negotiating it is going to be extremely difficult given the number of issues that are likely to be contentious. First, looking at sort of the disarmament pillar, the last remaining treaty, the New START Treaty, that governed nuclear warhead numbers for Russia and the United States has expired.

There are no constraints now on the U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons programs. China is building up its nuclear warhead stockpile. All of the nuclear-weapon states are investing in new systems. These are viewed by many countries that are party to the NPT as a violation of the Article VI disarmament commitments. So, certainly, I think we’re going to see contention between the nuclear-armed states and the non-nuclear-weapon states over how to address and advance disarmament while all of these states are investing in new systems. Another contentious issue-

Mark Leon Goldberg: Can I just drill down a little bit on this disarmament issue, because in my kind of preparation for this interview and my preparation for coverage of RevCon, it is an issue that is coming up repeatedly, particularly among most of the world that is a party to the NPT that is not a nuclear weapons state. You described the three parts of the NPT treaty, disarmament being one of the three kind of legs of the stool. And this is the leg that is withering, I would venture, you know, most quickly for the reasons you described, for the fact that there is no longer any bilateral agreements between Russia and the United States on the size of their nuclear stockpiles for the fact that China is rapidly developing its nuclear weapons program.

And this is seen, at least from the diplomatic angle that I’ve reported on, as a real affront to the NPT as a whole.

Kelsey Davenport: I think a number of non-nuclear weapons states understandably feel betrayed by the nuclear weapons states continuing to invest in new nuclear weapons systems that may make the use of nuclear weapons more likely, and the broader failure of the international system to condemn aggression by nuclear weapons states. The investment in new nuclear weapons systems, the expansion of the Chinese arsenal, for instance, none of this is happening in isolation. It’s happening against the backdrop where Russia, a nuclear weapons state, waged an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.

It’s happening against the backdrop of the United States and Israel conducting illegal strikes against Iran. All of this drives questions amongst the non-nuclear weapons states about the value of the NPT in providing for their security. And it’s pushing states that typically have been proactive members in the NPT and pushing for disarmament to reconsider their relationship with nuclear weapons. And that’s why these issues are all connected and have to be viewed within this broader security environment where additional states are beginning to ask if nuclear deterrence or if some type of nuclear extended deterrent relationship with the nuclear weapons state is more advantageous than pushing for full implementation of the NPT.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, disarmament, one key contentious issue that is sure to come up during this review conference. What else do you expect?

Kelsey Davenport: The security of safeguarded nuclear facilities is going to be another issue that could likely spur contention within the review conference. In the past several years, Russia attacked safeguarded nuclear facilities in Ukraine and is illegally occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Mark Leon Goldberg: The largest in Europe.

Kelsey Davenport: The largest in Europe, yes.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And it’s come under periodic attack, which is wildly irresponsible and scary.

Kelsey Davenport: Well, it’s not just attack of the facility itself. It’s attack of the infrastructure that’s necessary to safely run the facility. I mean, continued attacks against the power lines that connect Zaporizhzhia to the grid, concerns about cooling systems. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has repeatedly raised concerns about the safety of that facility. But it’s not just Zaporizhzhia. I mean, the United States in June conducted military strikes against safeguarded nuclear facilities in Iran, despite there being no evidence that Iran had made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program.

Similar strikes against safeguarded nuclear facilities have occurred since February 28th. So, again, there is this broader question about whether the NPT can actually provide protection for safeguarded nuclear programs in these non-nuclear-weapon states. And I think we’re likely to see Iran calling for condemnation of the U.S. strikes and Ukraine wanting to see some language regarding the security implications of Russia’s illegal occupation of Zaporizhzhia.

So, again, this could become a contentious issue, particularly if states insist on specifically naming aggressors. And if Iran tries to push for language condemning the United States, the U.S., of course, is going to object to any type of language in a consensus document that directly names it. Similar to the Russian case of Ukraine, actually was the naming of Russia’s aggression against Zaporizhzhia that prevented the adoption of a final document at the 2022 NPT Review Conference. So, this is still an issue. It’s going to be an issue in this review conference.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Any other key issues that you see being particularly contentious going into this?

Kelsey Davenport: I think the states’ parties need to be taking a better look at the relationship between advancing interest in nuclear energy programs, particularly the states that want to acquire the means of producing fissile materials, so uranium enrichment or plutonium separation, as part of those programs. And that link to proliferation concerns. If you look at South Korea, for instance, South Korea recently reached an agreement with the United States that indicates U.S. support for domestic uranium enrichment in South Korea.

There’s also a very active debate going on in South Korea right now about the value of domestic nuclear weapons to deter North Korea. Similarly, it looks like the United States is going to support Saudi Arabia having some type of domestic uranium enrichment program without more intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. All of these instances raise the concern that states are going to move closer to nuclear weapons by developing the capabilities to produce fissile material as part of nuclear energy programs.

So, I think trying to affirm the importance of IAEA safeguards, trying to push for universalization of more intrusive IAEA safeguards, a mechanism known as the Additional Protocol, that should be part of this NPT review conference to ensure that states are not trying to exploit the NPT’s provisions that guarantee the peaceful uses of nuclear programs to move closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, you mentioned the Iran war, specifically American and Israeli attacks on nuclear sites in Iran as being a particularly potentially contentious issue at this review conference. Are there other ways that you foresee the conflict in the Middle East as seeping into the conversations at RevCon?

Kelsey Davenport: Absolutely. One critical issue that I should have mentioned before when you asked about controversy at the review conference is that there is also an active discussion in Iran right now about withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaties. And an Iranian lawmaker introduced a bill to the Iranian parliament that would necessitate withdrawal from the NPT. That measure has not been passed. It would still need to be approved by the Guardian Council.

But increasingly in Iran, the factions that are in favor of nuclear weaponization, that view the development of nuclear weapons as necessary to deter further attacks against the territory of Iran, these voices are gaining prominence. They’re gaining support. So, there is a concern that going into the NPT review conference, that during the conference itself, there’s going to be a more active debate about withdrawal from the NPT. And if Iran begins that movement, I think other states are going to be watching very closely to see what consequences Iran might face and how the international community responds to a withdrawal.

Because one important aspect, particularly related to the nonproliferation pillar of the NPT, is that a lot of the successes in the non-proliferation aspect of the broader regime have come because there was general unity in how to respond to proliferation threats. We didn’t always see the P5 states act in complete unity. But certainly, we saw a willingness to hold states accountable for violations of the NPT. We saw this in the case of North Korea. We initially saw this in the case of Iran in the lead up to the negotiations of the 2015 nuclear deal, and the Security Council passing sanctions, demonstrating that there were consequences for violations of the safeguards that are required by the NPT.

There’s no longer any guarantee that the Security Council is willing to enforce the NPT because of the divide between Europe and the United States on one side and Russia on the other. And so, there is a real risk that states may try to exploit this growing divide in order to advance nuclear programs to the cusp of weaponization while minimizing the opportunity for consequences, minimizing the costs that they might pay through sanctions and diplomatic isolation. So that’s another dynamic in the Middle East that we could see impacting the broader review conference.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, this idea that if Iran exits the NPT, it might potentially open the floodgates for others if Iran doesn’t face any meaningful consequences for exiting the NPT. What are you looking or expecting from the American delegation at the Review Conference this year?

Kelsey Davenport: It’s really hard to say how the Trump administration is going to approach the review conferences. There are indications from U.S. statements over the past six months that the United States is increasingly comfortable with the being singled out with isolation in international fora. And to me, this raises the concern that the U.S. may view the review conference as a forum for calling out activities by particular states, probably most notably China, that it views as inconsistent with the NPT. This could be about China’s buildup of its nuclear arsenal. This could be about the U.S. allegations that China has been conducting nuclear tests.

But if the U.S. decides to approach the review conference as a forum for singling out adversarial states, then it’s extremely unlikely that the review conference will be able to adopt a final document. And it’s extremely unlikely that there is going to be the productive discussion about key issues that could lead to outcomes that advance and strengthen the treaty. Another aspect I would flag is that the U.S. is now engaged in an aggressive push to expand nuclear energy, both domestically, but also how the Trump administration is seeking to sign contracts for U.S. reactor exports overseas.

But there is no indication that the Trump administration is putting a high premium on advancing safeguards and calling for more intrusive International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring verification as part of that nuclear energy push. So, there could be tension in the Review Conference between the U.S. push to expand nuclear energy while other states are also trying to push for the universalization and strengthening of safeguards.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, you mentioned a few times of the kind of challenge to getting a consensus final outcome document from this conference. And I’ve not covered an NPT RevCon in particular in the past, but I’ve covered many UN conferences that are similar process-wise. And the idea is that you have these weeks of negotiations that all lead up to this consensus document that reflects all of the things that were agreed upon at this conference and even in the weeks and months prior.

But oftentimes this outcome document, whether one exists or whether one has failed to be adopted, is like a measure of success for the conference itself. So, I suppose, Kelsey, to what extent do you see the ability of this conference to produce that consensus final outcome document, basically reflecting where countries stand on the NPT today, where they see it going in the future as being a measure of success for this conference?

Kelsey Davenport: I don’t think that the conference should solely be defined as successful or unsuccessful on the basis of a final document. Certainly, final documents are important. They can reiterate and reaffirm past commitments that states have made to strengthen the NPT and set out new actions that would advance the goals of the treaty. That blueprint for moving forward does provide a metric against which to measure states’ actions. So, certainly, there’s value to a final document.

But it’s not the only measure of success. The NPT Review Conference is an important forum for discussing and advancing mechanisms, for clarifying understandings about nuclear aspects. That still has value, even in the absence of a final document. But I do think that there’s going to be more pressure on the production of a final document at this review conference than we’ve seen in the past because it follows two review conferences where a final document has not been adopted.

A third could be perceived as diminishing support for the NPT and erosion of the NPT overall. But another challenge to getting the final document is that there appears to be some tension between states about what a final document should look like. There are states that are going to push for a robust action plan that includes more specific steps to advance all three of the pillars of the NPT. So, perhaps similar to the 2010 NPT Review Conference final document, the last time a final document was adopted, which included a set of specific actions.

I think there are other states who are going to see value in the adoption of a final document, even if it does not include a robust action plan. So, they may see value in a final document that simply reaffirms the general commitment to the NPT and puts on the back burner or waters down some of the controversies that are going to plague the conference, like whether or not to condemn attacks on nuclear facilities, whether or not to call for a halting of nuclear modernization.

So, there’s going to be some tension that the chair of the NPT Review Conference and the state parties are going to have to navigate as they consider not only the value of trying to reach that final document as a metric of success, but specifically kind of what it contains.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, can I ask you, because again, having covered so many UN conferences before, this is like an ever-present question, whether or not a watered-down agreement is better than no agreement at all, if the more ambitious agreement is not realistically adoptable — Where do you stand on that question?

Kelsey Davenport: Oh, it’s challenging. I think that there are a number of contentious issues that, if not addressed, will continue to erode the NPT regime, will continue to erode confidence in the NPT. And watering over these issues, trying to water down the controversies in favor of consensus, I think, risks contributing to that overall discontent that the NPT no longer serves security interests, that it is no longer fit for the current security environment.

So, I would be hesitant. to push for a simple final document that does not adequately attempt to address some of these broader issues. At the same time, I don’t see value in trying to single out specific states for condemnation within the NPT review conference process or final document. I don’t think that that is a worthwhile pursuit in terms of advancing the treaty. So, I would look for specific steps, perhaps even steps that states have agreed to in the past that address some of these contemporary concerns but still provide a concrete path forward as kind of the middle ground between a review conference process that tries to name and shame offenders within the regime and a final document that is kind of watered down, that contains no specific commitments or actions and simply reaffirms the treaties.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Kelsey, thank you so much for your time. Anything else you wanted to get in before I let you go?

Kelsey Davenport: Just add that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty remains critical to preventing both the use of nuclear weapons and their proliferation. States need to approach this conference with seriousness, with a willingness to compromise, but also with innovation and flexibility. There is a pathway forward for advancing this treaty at the review conference if states are willing to negotiate and engage in good faith and look for those creative and flexible solutions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, as always, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. This was a really helpful curtain raiser for this conference.

Kelsey Davenport: Well, thank you so much for having me.

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It was a marathon — and my To Save Us From Hell co-host Anjali Dayal and I watched it all! In today’s episode, we tell you what we learned.

To kick things off, we explain how the process for selecting a UN Secretary-General works — and how these hearings fit into it. We then break down what we heard from each of the candidates: Michelle Bachelet, Rafael Grossi, Rebeca Grynspan, and Macky Sall, bringing you the key highlights and takeaways. Consider this your curtain-raiser for a year of public campaigning and backroom dealmaking that will result in the selection of the next UN Secretary-General in the coming months.

This episode is free for all and can also be found later today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.

The selection of the next Secretary General is a major story in international diplomacy and I plan on covering it to the finish line — whenever that may be (but hopefully before January 1!)

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the four candidates for UN Secretary-General made their case at the UN General Assembly. Across twelve hours spanning two days, they took questions from UN member states and civil society groups eager to learn more about their priorities, proclivities, and leadership styles should they become the next UN Secretary-General on January 1, 2027.

It was a marathon — and my To Save Us From Hell co-host Anjali Dayal and I watched it all! In today’s episode, we tell you what we learned.

To kick things off, we explain how the process for selecting a UN Secretary-General works — and how these hearings fit into it. We then break down what we heard from each of the candidates: Michelle Bachelet, Rafael Grossi, Rebeca Grynspan, and Macky Sall, bringing you the key highlights and takeaways. Consider this your curtain-raiser for a year of public campaigning and backroom dealmaking that will result in the selection of the next UN Secretary-General in the coming months.

This episode is free for all and can also be found later today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen.

The selection of the next Secretary General is a major story in international diplomacy and I plan on covering it to the finish line — whenever that may be (but hopefully before January 1!)

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Today begins a key inflection point for one of the major decisions facing the UN this year: who will be the next Secretary-General?

Antonio Guterres’ second and final term comes to an end on December 31. By January 1, 2027, a new Secretary-General will be leading the UN. Today and tomorrow, we will hear directly from the four declared candidates for the first time as they take questions from member states and civil society at a public forum held at the General Assembly. I will be following the hours of hearings, posting updates to our new WhatsApp group. Later this week, I will publish a free episode of Global Dispatches and To Save Us From Hell about the key takeaways from these hearings.

But for now, I wanted to take a particularly deep dive into the selection process for the next Secretary-General. Warning: what follows is an insider, process-heavy discussion of international bureaucracy and multilateral diplomacy, for those of you who crave insider-y conversations about UN rules of procedure for picking the Secretary-General.

So, with that throat clearing…Here’s what to expect in the race for the next UN Secretary General.

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I also wanted to give you a sneak preview of some other major stories I’ll be covering in the coming weeks—as well as some new ways to stay engaged.

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The Race for UN Secretary-General

Next week, the candidates for UN Secretary-General will have their day at the General Assembly. Each candidate will face hours of public-facing questions from member states and civil society, where we can expect to get a decent understanding of where they stand on key issues facing the United Nations and the world. This is the real kickoff in the race for UN Secretary-General, and I plan to cover it.

In partnership with the Gates Foundation, I’ll be publishing Global Dispatches episodes on the race for UN Secretary-General, as well as several podcast episodes on the diplomacy of global health and development.

Stay tuned for an episode next week in which Anjali Dayal and I discuss what we learned from these hearings, along with future episodes on global health and development.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Comes Under Review

The NPT is the backbone of global efforts to curb nuclear weapons. Since it entered into force in 1970, it has been a remarkably effective treaty in limiting the number of countries around the world that possess nuclear weapons. Every five years, it comes under review at a major UN conference known as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, or “NPT RevCon” in UN argot.

The RevCon kicks off on April 27 and runs for nearly a month, through May 22. I’ll be serving as something akin to a “pool reporter,” covering this conference in support of dozens of international journalists who report on nuclear security issues and feeding them news and insights from the confab. This project is backed by the Stanley Center for Peace and Security’s Developing Story Project, an initiative to support, strengthen, and sustain reporting on nuclear weapons and related issues. In partnership with Ploughshares, I’ll also publish public-facing episodes about what is at stake at this key diplomatic inflection point for nuclear security. Stay tuned for those.

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New Ways to Follow It All!

Global Dispatches is the longest-running independent international affairs podcast, and one thing I’ve learned over these past 13 years is that to adapt is to survive. To that end, we are making a major push into short-form video content that brings all you social media scrollers handpicked highlights from our episiodes. You can check these out on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook. Please like, subscribe, share, etc. These have been running for a few weeks now, and I’ve been really impressed with the results. (Let me know what you think).

Finally, I’ve started a Global Dispatches WhatsApp Channel. The mission of this channel is to offer pithy, insider-y insights into what global events reveal about the state of international cooperation and power, particularly at a moment when the UN is under significant stress. I’m planning to approach this channel like old-school Twitter and update it regularly with short takes, breaking news, and links to outside articles I find particularly useful. Next week, I’ll be posting regularly throughout the Secretary General candidate hearings. When you sign up, be sure to enable notifications!

As always, feel free to reach out to me with your ideas, suggestions, critiques, or simply to show your appreciation. What I do is a constant hustle, but I love it.

(And if you are around the UN the week of April 27, come say “hi.”)

—Mark

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One of the epicenters of this trend is Sudan, which, after three years of civil war, is the site of the world’s largest humanitarian emergency. This is where I caught up with my interview guest, Kate Philipps-Barrasso, Vice President for Policy and Advocacy at Mercy Corps, a large international humanitarian relief organization. She spoke with me from Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, where she describes the immediate impact that the war in Iran has had on access to food and water.

Earlier this week, Mercy Corps released a report showing how fuel, fertilizer, and shipping disruptions have affected Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar, including the kinds of decisions farmers are making right now.

The war in Iran’s impact on global food prices has thus far been on the periphery of commentary about the conflict — but as this conversation shows, there is great urgency in understanding the cascading humanitarian consequences that are already unfolding.

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Pandemic Risk Assessment is an emerging scientific toolkit designed to assess how pandemic risk is evolving over time. Rather than predicting the next outbreak, it integrates evidence across scientific disciplines to identify the drivers and estimate the probabilities of pandemic outbreaks. And in so doing, it can help policymakers prioritize prevention and preparedness investments before crises emerge.

Pandemic Risk Assessment is still an emerging field, but there is growing momentum to institutionalize it, with discussions exploring a range of possible models, including options inspired by bodies such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the UN-backed scientific body that regularly updates policymakers on the latest findings on climate change. Joining me to discuss why pandemic risk assessment is needed, what a robust scientific process might look like, and how to make it a permanent feature of our global pandemic preparedness landscape are Serina Ng and Ben Oppenheim.

Ben Oppenheim is a non-resident fellow at the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and at the Center for Global Development. Serina Ng is a Director at the World Health Organization and Executive Head of the G20 Joint Finance Health Task Force Secretariat, which is hosted at the WHO.

Today’s episode is produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation as a part of a series called Before the Outbreak, which examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic. Please visit www.globaldispatches.org to find other episodes in this series.

The episode is freely available across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can listen directly below.

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The views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the guests and the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcast’s partners.

Transcript edited for clarity

Ben Oppenheim: And a lot of the factors that are driving pandemic risk are factors that unfold on the timescale of decades. And so, we need to be looking ahead and try to understand as best we can both the risk here and now and how that risk is likely to shift.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast for the foreign policy and global development communities and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what is driving events in the world today. I’m your host, Mark Leon Goldberg. I am a veteran international affairs journalist and the editor of UN Dispatch. Enjoy the show!

Pandemic Risk Assessment is an emerging scientific toolkit designed to assess how pandemic risk is evolving over time. Rather than predicting the next outbreak, it integrates evidence across scientific disciplines to identify the drivers and estimate the probabilities of pandemic outbreaks. And in so doing, it can help policymakers prioritize prevention and preparedness investments before crises emerge.

Pandemic Risk Assessment is still an emerging field, but there is growing momentum to institutionalize it, with discussions exploring a range of possible models, including options inspired by bodies such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the UN-backed scientific body that regularly updates policymakers on the latest findings on climate change. Joining me to discuss why pandemic risk assessment is needed, what a robust scientific process might look like, and how to make it a permanent feature of our global pandemic preparedness landscape are Serina Ng and Ben Oppenheim.

Ben Oppenheim is a non-resident fellow at the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab and at the Center for Global Development. Serina Ng is a Director at the World Health Organization and Executive Head of the G20 Joint Finance Health Task Force Secretariat, which is hosted at the WHO.

Today’s episode is produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation as a part of a series called Before the Outbreak, which examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic. Please visit www.globaldispatches.org to find other episodes in this series. And just one note — the views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the guests and the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcast’s partners.

Now, here is Serina Ng and Ben Oppenheim.

So, in the first episode of this series, we discussed what constitutes disease surveillance. And this is distinct from what we’ll be discussing today, pandemic risk assessment, which is a new scientific effort to assess how pandemic risk is evolving over time. But before we discuss what would constitute a pandemic risk assessment, can you explain what gap such an effort would fill in our current global architecture for pandemic preparedness and response? Why, Serina, is something like this needed?

Serina Ng: So, I think we should just draw on our recent experience of COVID-19 and the experience of that pandemic. We know that there were really serious health, social and economic impacts. And, as policymakers, so during that time, I was working at the UK government in HM Treasury, the Ministry of Finance, and working very closely with other departments. But as policymakers, we felt that there was a gap in terms of information, both building up to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also on an ongoing basis. I think at the core, we know that pandemics are high impact events with really disastrous impacts on not just health, but the global economy. And the IMF estimate that the pandemic cost us all $13 trillion globally and pushed almost 100 million back into poverty.

So, it’s also set back development gains. And many economies are still facing that impact. So, when we think about what could have been done to reduce that, many countries had made preparations. There was not a common shared assessment of the risk and scale of future pandemics. And therefore, the expected sort of impact and options for preventing such an event were not universally shared or accessible. And what I think also it meant was that during the pandemic, there were really big gaps in the speed and scale, particularly in the financial response, which was necessary to support the health and economic response.

And we know that faster response would have really reduced the impact and saved lives and protected livelihoods. So really, I think it’s about thinking about how we fill that gap, given that I think there is quite a lot of evidence that this isn’t just a one-off.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Ben, what gaps from a scientific perspective might a pandemic risk assessment help to fill? Serina articulated a lot of the policy gaps that such an assessment would fill. What on the scientific side of things might it help do?

Ben Oppenheim: So, the problem we’re trying to solve is that we have deep gaps in our understanding of pandemic risk scientifically. And those gaps absolutely make the world vulnerable. And maybe it’s best to start with an example. If you think back to the understanding of COVID-19 during the pandemic, it was widely described as a once-in-a-century event, which made sense in a certain way because it occurred about 100 years after the 1918 flu, which was the last mega pandemic.

But it would be convenient if that were true that these kinds of events occurred on a once-in-a-century cadence or at a once-in-a-century probability of occurrence. But there have really been a steady drumbeat of pandemics. We’ve had two in the 21st century and a series in the 20th century of flu pandemics and emergence of novel viruses like HIV. And we are consistently surprised. And those surprises, as Serina outlined, have enormous costs for all of us. And so, part of the gap that needs to be filled technically is to better understand the types of threats we faced, which viruses are most likely to not just spark outbreaks, but evolve into pandemics.

And then the probability of those events occurring. And none of this is stationary. We have a sense from the data that pandemic risk is changing, and that the frequency of these events might be increasing due to a range of potential drivers like climate change and ecological disruption. What we don’t know yet, what we can learn as a community, is how quickly it’s changing and which drivers matter most. And that kind of information will be essential for policymakers to make wiser decisions about how to address the risk.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Ben, I wanted to stick with you in terms of kind of what drivers might matter most, what would be some of the scientific inputs that would inform pandemic risk assessment and constitute a pandemic risk assessment?

Ben Oppenheim: I spoke briefly about climate change and ecological disruption. And we know that those are likely two central factors influencing the occurrence of disease spillover in human populations. Then there are a lot of question marks about the social factors, which range from mobility patterns, you know, how humans move, both in terms of short-term travel and migration, as well as factors that shape how we all respond to outbreaks like misinformation, disinformation, which impacts our willingness to get vaccinated or work with non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing policies.

And all of those factors add up to really potentially significant changes in the risk. So, to understand how pandemic risk is changing, we need to develop a holistic picture of both of the push factors on the ecological, climatological side that might lead to more frequent disease spillover in humans, and then how that interacts with changes in how we live, how we behave, how we interact, how we work together. And all of that potentially adds up to pretty substantial evolutions in the risk over time. That’s what we need to understand better.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Serina, from a policy perspective, how might some of the inputs, if collected together and analyzed in a productive way that Ben just described, help inform policymakers?

Serina Ng: There is a lot of information and data and research out there. And actually, I think since COVID, there’s been significant efforts. The WHO has a priority list of pathogens. The WHO pandemic agreement was agreed to last year. You have pandemic fund in other areas. So, I think that there’s been a lot of change and new initiatives. But the thing that is still missing is this kind of global assessment of risks and risk drivers and likely scenarios, as Ben says.

So, there are some policy actions you can do without having a pandemic risk assessment. But if we think about the purpose of a lot of those initiatives, they need to be really grounded in a common understanding and assessment of the risk because they all need to coordinate with each other and governments need to coordinate both internally and externally with not just other countries, but international institutions and organizations. So, I think that, firstly, it would just enable better coordination because everybody has access to the same information.

There’s no asymmetry in information. And everybody also knows this is not going to be a perfect list and assessment of the risks and threats, but also where the really big uncertainties are. I think in terms of then sort of how this would then be used, so policymakers basically, as I said, need baseline information. So, for example, when I was in the Ministry of Finance, you want to know what the likely impacts are on the economy and to make informed decisions on how to better prepare and which pathogens are likely to have the biggest impact. How will they emerge? How can you detect them better?

What should you have in place for responding if there are health risks? And if things do develop, how much do you think this is going to cost and what level of reserves you might need? So, I think that’s sort of really the sort of key to what a global robust pandemic risk assessment can add. And it can also help identify where some of the policy questions you have might need further work to be answered, and really get that coherence between where the science is and what the sort of questions are being asked on the policy side.

And then I think the last thing I’d say is that, it really is to help develop a long-term approach to preventing and really focusing on that and preparing for a pandemic rather than this kind of response, which we know is just far more expensive for the global economy and also just for all of us in terms of health and social impacts. Finally, governments are faced with constrained resources. So, you’ve got multiple ongoing budgetary pressures and needs, social spending, infrastructure, etc. Also, climate change and other risks such as natural disasters. And so, when we think about the information we need on what’s happening or what’s likely to happen with those risks, we need to be able to think about the risk of pandemics on a similar basis to really compare what governments should prioritize.

And that would obviously be a decision that each government would make based on their own political preferences.

Mark Leon Goldberg: What would transform this idea that we’re talking about today into an actual existing entity or process? Like, what would be a pathway for political uptake of pandemic risk assessment?

Serina Ng: It needs to be an iterative process. The discussion that we’re having here is probably an example of how you need to bring together the different policy demands and sort of what a policymaker in ministry of finance might be different from what a policymaker in a department of health might want. And I think that is one of the sort of key things. I think firstly, it is really having those really complex discussions with policymakers on what they need and what would be useful for them. And then I think you would need to have those sort of parallel conversations on the technical side and bring that together.

So, I think it’s quite an intensive and iterative process to come up with something that will have a strong use case. And I think that is really what you’ll need if you want to make it, something that’s real and that is used.

Mark Leon Goldberg: From a scientific perspective, are there any entities out there that the pandemic risk assessment might look to potentially as a model?

Ben Oppenheim: There are a lot of sources of inspiration out there that we look to. There’s in fact a whole class of organizations often called science policy interfaces that exist to solve exactly the kinds of problems that we’re trying to solve, to help scientists come together through a structured process, an organization, or a mechanism to really understand the state of the science, to come to consensus if possible on what it means, and then to translate that oftentimes into analyses and results and arguments that can help inform policy.

That kind of work is often deeply interdisciplinary. So, the IPCC, for example, brings a number of different disciplines together under one large roof to help the world make sense of a changing climate, what’s driving it and what it means. In a similar fashion, we need to bring together a wide range of communities — virology, ecology, social sciences, economics — to understand that complex interplay I was describing earlier between drivers of viral spillover and spread, and then translate that into an understanding of the impact on societies. So there are a lot of potential models we can look to.

And I think it’s important to note that the IPCC is one possible structure for a science policy interface, but it’s not the only one. Just in the last few years, we’ve had similar structures built for chemicals, waste and pollution, for artificial intelligence, for AMR, antimicrobial resistance. So, there are a lot of science policy interfaces out there, and they vary in terms of their design. And so that is something that we’re beginning to investigate, to think carefully about different options in terms of both design and deployment of a science policy interface. And we’re in active listening mode to try to understand which options are politically viable and which options can deliver results.

Mark Leon Goldberg: That’s interesting. The IPCC is probably, arguably, the most well-known of these science policy interfaces. Every few years, you’ll get a new IPCC report that synthesizes a lot of the latest research on climate change and in a really coherent way for policymakers, articulates the implications of their latest scientific consensus. Serina, is that like a model that you see as a potential for pandemic risk assessment?

Serina Ng: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting how the IPCC has evolved over time. And I think the current outputs where you have enormous amounts of underlying scientific research going on, and a lot of it interdisciplinary. And then you have this kind of, I think it’s about a 20 page kind of policy executive summary that provides sort of some headline figures and details, I think is very helpful in terms of really just setting out some of the key aspects and its role in terms of being the consensus from all the experts.

So, I think the sort of idea of something that is usable, that’s robust, that is the best available evidence out there and how that translates into impacts on people, there are some really important elements in there that policymakers need. And I think, just going back to kind of what you need as a policymaker, I think the ultimate question as well is just like, who is impacted? Who, by geography, by social factors, by the scale of impact are the sort of detail that you need to know to start to be able to think about what targeted policies look like.

And the other thing I think that is really useful in the IPCC comparison is this long-term approach. So, if you don’t do anything now, then this is what is likely to happen in terms of temperature rise, in terms of impact on agriculture, water, more broadly, natural disasters, etc. I think that is also quite helpful in terms of just planting that long-term view for policymakers, where obviously the short-term cycle can be stronger, given the political nature of spending decisions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: It sounds like it’s almost institutionalizing long-term thinking, which is necessary for pandemic preparedness and response.

Ben Oppenheim: I think that’s an essential point. I mean, these are low frequency, high severity events. They occur sporadically. And a lot of the factors that are driving pandemic risk are factors that unfold on the timescale of decades. And so, we need to be looking ahead and try to understand as best we can, both the risk here and now and how that risk is likely to shift. And a lot of the investments that we need to make to mitigate the risk, to address it, to prevent or contain events that could become pandemics are going to be long-term investments. So, I think that lens is absolutely essential.

And I want to pick up on one other feature of the IPCC that Serina alluded to, which is the regular nature of the assessment process, that these reports that it produces occur on a known cadence and cycle. And I think for us, that is a really important inspiration because we need a steady cadence like that to help us keep score, to understand and to catalyze political will so that leaders and publics have a sense of where the risk is trending and whether they’re responding appropriately to it.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And, on that point, Serina, in the coming months or years, even, are there any kind of moments in international diplomacy or policymaking that you see as an opportune chance to advance this idea and help to institutionalize, in some way or another, pandemic risk assessment?

Serina Ng: I think there are various events in the international calendar that are really good opportunities where you have a gathering of international community for certain issues. I think that, of course, we have the UN high-level meeting on pandemic PPR this year, but I think that there are also many other opportunities for engaging with the right stakeholders. I think each of these are sort of steppingstones in the development of a pandemic risk assessment. So, I think that the high-level meeting is an important opportunity, but that it is part of this kind of iterative process to really gather the views and thoughts of the many stakeholders who will both be sort of customers of this work, but also will be hopefully inputting and supporting it as well.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Ben, I suppose, similarly, you alluded earlier about how different scientific inputs into a pandemic risk assessment are kind of somewhat siloed at the moment to a certain extent. How do you therefore kind of socialize this idea of a more collaborative or integrated approach among the scientific community going forward?

Ben Oppenheim: This is something that we’re actively working on at the moment. I think it’s important to note that we’re not starting from scratch. In some scientific communities, there’s been an enormous amount of work to assemble data, methods, tools that can help answer critical questions about pandemic risk and how it’s changing. And the challenge, Mark, as you said, is hooking those together in a way that is greater than the sum of the parts to answer really fundamental questions for policy. So we’ve been holding a series of meetings now, stretching back almost two years, to bring scientific communities that often don’t talk to each other together, to see both how they think about pandemic risk, the kinds of data and methods they bring to the table, and begin to feel out how they would collaborate to answer questions jointly. So that’s an evolving process. We have another meeting upcoming this year.

And probably the best thing we can do is demonstrate results by building prototype tools and getting some of these analyses out there in the world, both for policymakers to react to and for scientists to see as proof of concept. Ultimately, I think for scientists, we want our work to have meaning and to make impact on these problems. That’s an essential part of the enterprise. And when there’s a demand signal from policy requesting better answers to these types of technical questions, scientists will often respond. So that is really, I think, part of what I’m hoping for, that we can generate that demand signal to inspire scientists and to bring them together around a common set of problems.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Now, Serina and Ben, is there anything else you wanted to make sure you got in, discuss before we conclude?

Ben Oppenheim: I think better information on pandemic risk can help make many, many other types of policy decisions, if not easier, at least clearer. And preparedness is probably a key example of this. It can sometimes be helpful to think with analogies. And if you imagine earthquakes, for example, we have buildings that are rated to withstand certain levels of shake, certain magnitudes of earthquakes. And there’s really nothing analogous in how we prepare for pandemics.

And that’s a gap. It’s a really important gap because a health system might be able to withstand and say support a population to get through a COVID-19 level respiratory pandemic, but be completely unprepared for something on the magnitude of the 1918 flu in terms of peak infections and death rates. So, preparedness is not a generic concept. We can be prepared for some threats and not for others. And so, generating better understanding, both of the types of threats that might emerge and the probability of pandemics of different severity levels, that can help make preparedness choices potentially a lot easier in terms of making, as Serina mentioned earlier, wise bets about where to allocate constrained resources.

How many vaccines or masks do we need to stockpile? How many respirators? Where? What do we spend on that? Versus other types of preparedness investments. Those kinds of choices in a resource-constrained environment matter deeply, and we can help make them more effectively with better information on risk.

Serina Ng: I think the only other thing I think just wanted to emphasize, because I think I don’t want it to come across that we’re basically saying that countries can’t do anything without this. I think it’s much more the point. So, countries sort of prepare mostly individually. They use their sort of latest assessment they have, they work with the WHO, and their own sort of scientific community and the international community. I think the really big point is, is that building this together in a consensus driven way reduces the issues of coordination and everybody essentially working off a different set of assumptions.

When you consider about what the global nature of pandemics, it would make far more sense for everybody to, at least be aware of, they don’t have to use it, but to be aware of a common set of assumptions about risk pathways and impact. I think that’s just quite an important point because it doesn’t diminish what lots of countries have done. And it’s a national issue, really, in terms of what you do on this.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Serina and Ben, thank you so much for your time.

Serina Ng: Thanks, Mark.

Ben Oppenheim: Thank you very much, Mark.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And, of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive.

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Many of our best surveillance tools today that were originally built to target specific diseases like polio and malaria have become critical infrastructure for outbreak response and early warning across a wide range of pathogens. This includes laboratory networks, diagnostic tools, and community health workers—all of which play vital roles in broader outbreak preparedness.

In today’s episode, two experts who have helped create platforms to monitor and respond to specific diseases explain how those systems have been leveraged to detect and respond to outbreaks of all kinds. Hamid Jafari served as Director of Polio Eradication for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean Region, and Krystal Burungi Mwesiga is an entomologist at the Uganda Virus Research Institute, where she works as a research and outreach associate with the Target Malaria, a not-for-profit research consortium.

We kick off by discussing how these disease-specific surveillance platforms work, then broaden the conversation to how they’ve been adapted to respond to other outbreaks—and what can be done to make these tools even stronger.

This episode is produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation as part of a series called “Before the Outbreak” that examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic. The episode is freely available across all podcast listening platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can also listen directly below.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: The village health teams are on the ground, they are in the villages, and they’re the easiest form of keeping track and carrying out quick response to outbreaks in all the different areas of the country.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast for the foreign policy and global development communities and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what is driving events in the world today. I’m your host, Mark Leon Goldberg. I am a veteran international affairs journalist and the editor of UN Dispatch. Enjoy the show.

Robust disease surveillance systems are the foundation of strong public health and essential to preventing, detecting, and responding to health threats before they escalate.

Many of our best surveillance tools today that were originally built to target specific diseases like polio and malaria have become critical infrastructure for outbreak response and early warning across a wide range of pathogens. This includes laboratory networks, diagnostic tools, and community health workers, all of which play vital roles in broader outbreak preparedness. In today’s episode, two experts who helped create platforms to monitor and respond to specific diseases explain how those systems have been leveraged to detect and respond to outbreaks of all kinds.

Hamid Jafari served as Director of Polio Eradication for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean region, and Krystal Birungi Mwesiga is an entomologist at the Uganda Virus Research Institute, where she works as a research and outreach associate with Target Malaria — a non-profit research consortium. We kick off by discussing how these disease-specific surveillance platforms work, then broaden the conversation to how they’ve been adapted to respond to other outbreaks, and what can be done to make these tools even stronger.

Today’s episode is produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation as part of a series called Before the Outbreak that examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic. Please visit globaldispatches.org to view other episodes in this series. And to note, the views and opinions expressed in this episode are those of the guests and the host and do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcast’s partners.

Now, here is my conversation with Hamid Jafari and Krystal Birungi Mwesiga.

Krystal and Hamid, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hamid Jafari: Thank you.

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: Thank you so much.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, I am joined by a polio expert and a malaria expert, but we are not here to talk about polio or malaria per se, rather how programs to monitor and respond to those two diseases have and may play a role in confronting new pathogens. Before we get there though, can I have each of you briefly discuss what malaria and polio surveillance and response looks like in practice? After all, these are very two different diseases. Krystal, let’s start with you. How do you track malaria cases on the ground? And can you share how this works in Uganda?

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: Malaria remains the number one killer of children under the age of five in Uganda. So, it is definitely a national priority. And to make sure that we can keep track of the cases that we’ve got and all related infrastructure, we, in Uganda, have a couple of ways to do this. The first thing is Uganda has an electronic health management information system. So, this system is made up of two systems combined. So, the first thing is there is something called the mTrac. And the mTrac is a digital system that allows the collection of data from health facilities, but also from private clinics and drug shops using a simple SMS function, a short messaging system. So that means that different service providers can simply use their phones to send in messages concerning the malaria statistics or diagnostics that they have from their clinics. And all of this is integrated online onto a digital system. The second thing is the district health information system.

So, this targets specifically the healthcare facilities. So, every healthcare facility also digitally uploads all the data related to malaria from their facility on a weekly basis. So, together with the mTrac are what-make-up-dot electronic health management information system, and that allows the Ministry of Health to keep a weekly track of all cases happening and being reported within the country.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And correct me if I’m wrong. I mean, with malaria itself, you have like rapid diagnostic tests. So, presumably, a lot of the data being uploaded into these systems are, what, the results of these tests?

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: Exactly. When individuals go into the health clinics with this complaint, they’re feeling sick, they’re not feeling well, the clinics or hospitals will do the malaria testing. So, they use the rapid diagnostic tests, and depending on the level of healthcare facility, the more advanced healthcare facilities will also do a microscopy test. So, they confirm the diagnosis with microscopy where they can actually see the parasites. That is due to resistance and a whole bunch of other things. But yes, so they do use the rapid tests in a lot of places.

And in the more advanced healthcare facilities, they do microscopy as well. And all of that data is reported on a weekly basis into this digital system. Aside from the healthcare centers uploading everything into the district health information system, we also have something called the village health teams. Now, this is based on integrated community case management. So, this is where you’re looking at the community helping to track and treat malaria cases. So, the village health teams are based in the communities. They’re people who are trained to diagnose and treat malaria within the communities because the fact that a lot of places are quite remote and may not have access to healthcare facilities is just not very practical all over the country.

So, these people will be receiving cases that they diagnose and treat. And they also report this data to the nearest health centers so that it gets integrated into the district health information system. So, that is another tier to this surveillance that happens in Uganda.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Hamid, unlike malaria, which there are millions of affections worldwide of malaria each year, polio is on the verge of eradication. Can you describe how the polio surveillance network, which was established in the early 1990s, has been used, how it operates, and how it feeds into what we know about polio cases around the world?

Hamid Jafari: Even though now the cases of polio are vanishingly small, you still need even the most sensitive systems for polio virus everywhere, essentially, because we know that the virus travels very fast, it travels silently, so you still need a very sensitive system for detecting polio virus. The mainstay, the gold standard for detecting polio virus is through what is called acute flaccid paralysis surveillance or AFP surveillance. And then this system in many places, increasingly, is supplemented by environmental surveillance where sewage and surface water is tested for the presence of poliovirus.

Acute flaccid paralysis surveillance systems essentially operate in every district around the world except perhaps for a highly developed industrialized countries that look at enteroviruses and other systems to track polioviruses. So, the operational and tactical and the laboratory elements of what we call AFP surveillance really encompass the essential elements that are needed for surveillance of almost all diseases. So, many of these elements are very, very… the skills and operations are transferable. So, what you have is field surveillance officers who are constantly looking for cases of acute flaccid paralysis.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And acute flaccid paralysis, I mean, it probably sounds like exactly it is. It’s a child exhibiting symptoms of polio, potentially.

Hamid Jafari: That is correct. So, the idea is that the most likely place to find polio virus is in the stool samples of persons who have developed an illness that’s typical of polio, which is acute flaccid paralysis. So that’s why there are many causes of acute flaccid paralysis. And what you want to see is that even in the absence of poliovirus, all countries are able to detect cases of acute flaccid paralysis because in case poliovirus enters those countries, through that system, they’re able to pick up poliovirus. So, that’s why it is the gold standard for polio surveillance. And so the elements of surveillance officers sensitizing all types of care providers, whether those are pediatricians, neurologists, children’s hospitals, physiotherapy centers, and it really depends on the local health-seeking practices.

This sometimes includes focal points that are trained in temples and shrines and traditional healers are on the reporting list because you don’t want to miss a case of acute flaccid paralysis because you risk missing circulation of polio virus in a given area. Then a case, thorough case investigation is involved. Once a case of acute flaccid paralysis is detected, there is a systematic field investigation, which particularly includes, very early on, the need to collect stool samples for laboratory testing on two separate days. We really have to set up a system for collection and transport of samples to an accredited, reliable laboratory that is accredited to test for poliovirus.

And so, you need systems for reverse cold chain, transport systems to transport samples in an appropriate conditions, and then, of course, laboratory diagnostics capacities to be able to detect poliovirus. So, these are the essential elements of any surveillance system that should be able to detect cases, investigate cases, collect samples, transport them, and get them confirmed in a laboratory. As I mentioned, the other system that is increasingly being used to supplement acute flaccid paralysis surveillance is environmental surveillance.

You know, a few years ago, even we had polio virus detected in the sewage and around New York, London, some cities in Europe where environmental surveillance is conducted. And more recently, this environmental surveillance system has actually been used to detect COVID because COVID is also excreted by infected individuals and it can be picked up in environmental surveillance. So, there is actually ongoing environmental surveillance in some parts of the world for COVID as well.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I mean, in each case, it sounds like you have this kind of combination of community level outreach backed by a logistics of scientific testing and sampling and reporting. Now, I venture that outside the global health community, it’s not widely known that systems developed to track one disease have been used to support responses for others. I’m curious to learn from you, Krystal, of examples and how investments in malaria surveillance have been used to confront other pathogens, other diseases, and what that looked like in practice.

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: Yes. Som the systems put in place for malaria have been very key in a number of surveillance efforts for other diseases as well. So, if we take into consideration, for example, the mTrac that I mentioned earlier is used to keep track of malaria cases and other malaria-related things like drugs.

Mark Leon Goldberg: That SMS-based system that you described earlier.

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: Exactly, the SMS-based system. So, that system integrates all the data into that district health information system, that online big database that’s congregating all this data. So, that system has indicators for other notifiable diseases, including maternal and neonatal deaths. So, for example, what happens is that thresholds are preset into that system. And when that threshold is reached, then that triggers an alert to the district health teams. So, for example, if you get 20 cases of typhoid reported, because they can also be reported through the system, then that triggers a response.

Or a single case of viral hemorrhagic fever, that also triggers an immediate response. That means that you can get reports coming in from remote areas very quickly. And it makes the response really, really fast. But places where it has really been indispensable has been when it comes to the community level, the village health team system, because this is a system that allowed instant reporting for COVID cases, for monkeypox. The village health teams are on the ground. They are in the villages. And they’re the easiest form of keeping track and carrying out quick response to outbreaks in all the different areas of the country. So, they’re really key for that.

But in addition to how key they are to the surveillance and reporting, they’re also key to the response. So, for COVID-19, for example, there was a need to do a vaccination drive. And that is something that required building community trust and also keeping track of who is actually in the communities that needs vaccination. So, people that live in the communities that are trusted to deliver health information that is accurate were really vital to this process because those are people that got people to go out and get vaccinated, that were able to lead the mobile vaccination teams to the houses of those that were most vulnerable to the severe symptoms of COVID-19.

So, at that point, the village health teams were extremely key in situations like that, in situations where people are in lockdown, isolated, and need maternity care during the disease, but could not get transportation to healthcare facilities. This part of the system is what could fill in that sort of gap. And that is something that you see frequently in all the different epidemic responses. If you’re talking Ebola, if you’re talking all those things where you need to have accurate communication and also where you need to interrupt cultural practices.

So, if you have Ebola and the practice is to wash the body before you bury it, it’s much more effective if you have a village health worker that is trained to communicate this and identify a case early enough before the family wants to do that, and is able to change perceptions on a base level to prevent continued outbreaks.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And it’s all based essentially on trust. And these village health workers are of the community, and presumably one way in which they’ve built trust over the years is by accurately diagnosing malaria cases, and they can transfer that kind of trust they’ve built to confront other diseases. So, it’s not just about reporting on diseases, but actually being able to confront them as well, using the trust that they’ve built over the years on, say, malaria.

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: I would say exactly that because they were established to combat malaria because of how high the burden was and the cost in terms of lives. But that community trust that they can then gain for having accurate knowledge on a disease or being able to diagnose and treat it, then gives them capital to be able to talk about different issues. But it also provides pre-trained people that are already perceived to have some kind of background in managing a health condition that can be trained on other diseases and handling other outbreaks.

So, it’s almost like an additional resource that costs very little actual additional money, but has a huge impact on the ground.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Hamid, on polio, how have systems, particularly I would presume data systems developed for polio, like the real-time reporting that you described earlier, been adapted for other public health priorities?

Hamid Jafari: Perhaps in two broad categories. I think the first category is, for example, this is the best example in the African region, when polio eradication was being established, there was significant injection of financial resources to establish acute flaccid paralysis surveillance. What countries and WHO worked on was not just a surveillance system for acute flaccid paralysis. They applied those resources to develop more integrated disease surveillance systems so that from the community level, all the way to a district state surveillance officer, was trained not only in acute flaccid paralysis surveillance, but also for reporting other vaccine-preventable diseases — yellow fever, meningitis. So, their system design from the start was a more integrated approach.

Similarly, while not done exactly that way in India and in some other countries, initially the acute flaccid paralysis system was established. It was very robust and strong, well-trained surveillance officers and health workers all the way down to the village level. And then on top of that, systematically surveillance for other diseases, important diseases such as measles or in focus areas and districts with high incidence of meningitis, those disease reporting elements were added. So, this has now continued in most of the world where you really rarely have standalone systems for just acute flaccid paralysis surveillance.

The same surveillance officers are detecting and reporting systematically many other diseases. So, that’s one approach that has been applied.

Mark Leon Goldberg: On that approach, are there examples you could provide about how a system developed to detect acute flaccid paralysis have been used to detect another disease that emerged?

Hamid Jafari: Yes. These systems then, because they have the basic operational capacity and training, they have the capacity to pivot, to detect an outbreak and investigate cases in an outbreak. And that’s why we have seen examples of Ebola, especially the massive outbreaks of Ebola in West Africa around 2014. That’s when the best example is illustrated from Nigeria. Nigeria is the largest country in Africa. And if Ebola would have established uncontrolled transmission in Nigeria, it would have been a global disaster. And it was really the polio surveillance officers, the National Emergency Operations Center for Polio, who immediately conducted the investigation of cases, contact tracing, and were able to very rapidly contain that Ebola outbreak in Nigeria.

And this, of course, then happened on a massive scale at the start of the COVID pandemic. So in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in India, the same surveillance officers were the ones who were doing case detections, investigations, contact tracing. The national EOC staff data managers were the ones who continued, throughout the COVID pandemic in Pakistan, provide the analysis for the national decision-making authorities about the steps they needed to take for control measures.

The initial laboratory testing for COVID in several countries like Sudan and Pakistan was actually done by the polio virologists in those national labs. And then the community workers, vaccinators and community informants for acute flaccid paralysis played a key role in providing information to the communities about COVID. They were distributing soaps and personal protective equipment. Another dimension which sort of appeared recently, and this is still active, is happening in Gaza.

Because of the war in Gaza, the acute flaccid paralysis surveillance was quite devastated. And when, through environmental surveillance, polio virus was detected in Gaza in 2024, working closely with the local authorities and local partners, WHO re-established to help restore acute flaccid paralysis surveillance system. So when that happened, a case of polio was identified through the AFP surveillance system. But then subsequently, the authorities uncovered an outbreak of what is called Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is GBS, which causes acute flaccid paralysis. And that outbreak was related to, of course, what was happening in terms of fecal contamination, lots of diarrheal diseases, particularly Campylobacter.

So, you enhance a system to look for one virus and it then gives you an understanding of another outbreak that is exposed through that system.

Mark Leon Goldberg: That’s interesting. I had not heard of that identification of Guillain-Barré in Gaza through the polio surveillance networks. That’s an interesting example. The other example, though, you gave of Nigeria in the West Africa Ebola outbreak is one I have heard of before. And it’s often discussed in global health circles, how you had this biggest Ebola outbreak in history, ravaging Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea. And then I recall there was a case in Lagos, a massive crowded city, yet Nigeria did not experience an explosive Ebola outbreak precisely because it was that polio surveillance system that identified it quickly. That’s an interesting example.

Hamid Jafari: Absolutely. It saved us.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, we’ve talked about the role that these surveillance systems play and the benefits that they produce to communities overall. I’m interested in learning from each of you what the broader international community can do to strengthen these surveillance systems in the context of what is essentially a very rapidly evolving pathogen threat environment today. How can, say, the malaria surveillance systems be strengthened to even more robustly do what it’s already doing, fill whatever gaps might remain in disease surveillance systems?

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: So, the malaria surveillance system works really well, but it does have a few gaps that would greatly improve the efficiency of it. If you start at the community level, there is the fact that this is a system that involves training certain members of the community to diagnose and treat malaria, to report cases, and also other related diseases or even just in terms of outbreaks, and so on. But the facilitation is lacking.

So, a lot of times the attention is on can we identify and train these people and not so much on how do we sustain their activities. There’s not a lot of funding at that level. And that sometimes means that for people that are based in remote communities where it’s literally hand to mouth, if they spend all day performing these health care services, then sometimes that means they don’t get to work, they don’t get to eat, it affects their income quite heavily. So that lack of supplementation sometimes creates gaps. The second thing is their ability to report because it is based on an SMS system, which is great when you can access SMSs.

But sometimes the very network, telephone networks in some places are just too inconsistent and you have late reporting, or in some cases over-reporting because not all diagnostics are present at the time of treatment. So, sometimes they will treat based on symptoms because they do not have the diagnostic tools and someone is sick. So, you might report a suspected case that is not confirmed. So, this system has both suspected and confirmed cases. And sometimes that can lead to overreporting. So you could have underreporting or overreporting because of some of these gaps.

Frequency of reporting, for example. So, there’ll be areas where the reporting is below 80%. Not very many, but it does happen. And that’s a gap. And so that means that if you have that kind of gap where data should have been collected on a weekly basis, but it’s being collected quarterly or monthly, then that means that not only are you losing data on malaria cases, but also you’re hampering the ability of the system to identify other outbreaks early that could be actually caught by this system just because of all those gaps in reporting. So basically strengthening some of the infrastructure of the system still.

You’re looking at network infrastructure. You’re looking at basically the support of the individuals that are feeding into it and the frequency of data collection, monitoring, how frequent the monitoring can be done and who is doing it and facilitating that as well. So, all of this could go towards strengthening that system and making it more able to support both malaria and other disease outbreaks as well.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And, Hamid, the polio eradication initiative in global polio efforts have been broadly very successful. But what else can be done to strengthen that system, not only for polio, but more broadly for new pathogens and for other pathogens that might pose a threat?

Hamid Jafari: I think first is that there has to be thoughtful approaches to both strengthening individual targeted disease surveillance systems, particularly for diseases that are targeted for eradication and elimination where you need highly sensitive and timely systems in a way that there is a sort of built-in tension. One is that you want the surveillance system and the officers and resources to be focused to make sure they don’t miss, for example, poliovirus anywhere. And that’s what the donors to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative expect, that the surveillance system will work seamlessly.

On the other hand, everybody also believes that there should be more integration, there should be broader platforms. And there is a risk if this is not done well, that you could overwhelm the system that then starts to miss polio cases, starts to miss other important diseases because too much has been put on a system that’s not strong enough to withstand all of the responsibilities. So that’s one tension. Secondly, I think there is partner and donor expectations.

I think those also have to be broadened to say that, look, how can these systems be fully leveraged? And then context-specific and well-thought-out integration, starting with what I call functional integration. Instead of integrating every element of every disease surveillance system, there are certain cross-functionalities. So, for example, economizing efficiencies on training for surveillance, data analysis, specimen collection and transport, transport logistics of surveillance officers visiting health facilities, hospitals, care providers, sensitizing village informants and such. So, those kinds of things is a kind of a functional integration that we could start with.

One overall is how to more thoughtfully and systematically integrate systems without really compromising the integrity of the priority disease systems. I think overall, secondly, in terms of what at this time when there is such shortage of global public health funding needs to happen at this time. I think for me, first and foremost, is there is still a limited understanding about the power of surveillance to prevent, detect, and respond to threats. And comparatively surveillance is highly cost effective compared to the costs that go into control of diseases and particularly responding to massive outbreaks and epidemics that could be reduced in scope and size if they are detected early.

So relatively speaking, relative to the cost of control measures, surveillance is highly cost effective, and this is not widely recognized. So, I think if we promote this kind of an understanding about the power and cost effectiveness of surveillance, this broad understanding could then ideally form the basis for building the political will, as well as the financial investments that are needed to build and maintain strong surveillance systems. And then finally, I would say that international cooperation is key. As we know, increasingly, diseases and pathogens are crossing species, and they’re crossing international borders.

And in this context, establishing and respecting international treaties, international health regulations, those things become absolutely critical of pathogen sharing across countries, making sure that there is equitable distribution of data and information. And so, you do need a central coordinating body, which right now, WHO is the organization for ensuring global health security through these international health regulations, international treaties, and an organization that is actually run by member states. So, I think making sure that these systems remain functional and effective becomes very, very important.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Before I let you go, is there anything else you want to add, another point you want to make, a question I didn’t ask, Krystal?

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: Maybe the fact that malaria surveillance is a little bit more than just case surveillance and management surveillance. We also have vector surveillance, where we look at insecticide resistance mapping and we look at mosquito species and so on. And just like Hamid said, this is becoming an international matter. We’re seeing invasive species spreading to countries and continents they’ve never been on before that can transmit malaria. We are seeing local transmission happening for the first time in decades in countries like the USA.

So, surveillance at the moment is extremely important. Response is going to be extremely important and it’s going to heavily rely on being able to be up to date and on track with the surveillance for these disease outbreaks.

Hamid Jafari: In addition to, of course, prioritizing investments in public health in general and surveillance in particular, it’s very important that we take steps that prevent surveillance data and the information that is generated from getting politicized.

Because if it gets too politicized, then it can start to interfere with control measures that can be delayed or completely jeopardized because of politicization, loss of trust. And I think ensuring that any public health system, particularly surveillance system, has a connection with communities and is constantly curating public trust, especially in times of peace, in the absence of outbreaks, is extremely important so that when there is, in fact, an epidemic or a pandemic or an outbreak, the public, the communities and the political system actually trusts the surveillance data and its outcomes.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Hamid and Krystal, thank you so much for your time. I learned a lot from this conversation.

Hamid Jafari: Thank you. It was a pleasure to be with you.

Krystal Birungi Mwesiga: It was a pleasure to be here.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive. Thank you..

Earlier this week, the UN Secretary-General’s office announced a “Task Force” comprised of key international diplomats “to develop and propose technical mechanisms specifically designed to meet humanitarian needs in the Strait of Hormuz.” The key focus will be creating a mechanism by which fertilizer and humanitarian goods can safely make their way to and from the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, at the Security Council, Bahrain is pushing for a robust resolution that would compel Iran to open the strait—potentially under the threat of force.

In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, Anjali Dayal and I explain these proposals and weigh whether or not they stand a chance of success. We also discuss the precariousness of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon after the deaths of three Indonesian peacekeepers in 24 hours, the latest surprises in the race for UN Secretary-General, and what happened when two socialists (Zohran Mamdani and António Guterres) met at the UN for the first time.

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The war in the Middle East has claimed its first UN casualties: three Indonesian peacekeepers in Lebanon were killed in under 24 hours. With Israel intent on occupying the same part of southern Lebanon that UN peacekeepers are meant to patrol, can the peacekeeping mission even continue? Meanwhile, in New York, a Secretary-General-led diplomatic effort to open the Strait of Hormuz for humanitarian and fertilizer shipments is taking shape, while the Security Council debates authorizing the use of force to escort food through the strait. Do either of these efforts have a meaningful chance of success? Anjali and Mark discuss all this, as well as the latest — unexplained — shakeup in the Secretary-General race.

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Robust disease surveillance systems are the foundation of strong public health systems and are essential to preventing, detecting, and responding to health threats before they escalate. Commitments to and investments in quality disease surveillance systems are key to smart, cost-effective public health decision-making, which is needed more than ever.

Before the Outbreak is a three-part podcast series produced in partnership between Global Dispatches and the United Nations Foundation, in which we explore how the world sees, anticipates, and prepares for current and emerging health threats. Through stories and science, this series highlights the critical functions that protect us – before the outbreak begins.

Our debut episode features the expertise of Dr. Ciro Ugarte, Director of Health Emergencies at the Pan American Health Organization, and Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a professor at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. We begin by defining our terms—that is, what do we mean by disease surveillance? We then discuss how disease surveillance works in practice and what can be done to strengthen our global defenses against the next pandemic.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: Because of the exponential spread of outbreaks, one person can launch a pandemic, and therefore one person can stop it. An outbreak can emerge anywhere, and you really do need to make sure that every person is as empowered as possible to respond.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast for the foreign policy and global development communities and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what is driving events in the world today. I’m your host, Mark Leon Goldberg. I am a veteran international affairs journalist and the Editor of UN Dispatch.

Enjoy the show.

Today’s episode is the debut of a three-part series called Before the Outbreak, which examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next pandemic. Produced in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, this series explores how the world detects, anticipates, and prepares for current and emerging health threats. Through stories and science, it highlights the critical functions that protect us before an outbreak begins.

In today’s episode, I speak with Dr. Ciro Ugarte, Director of Health Emergencies at the Pan American Health Organization, and Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a professor at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. We begin by defining our terms, that is, what do we mean by disease surveillance? We then discuss how disease surveillance works in practice and what can be done to strengthen our global defenses against the next pandemic.

And one quick note before we begin — In this episode and throughout the series, the views and opinions expressed are those of the guests and hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views of the podcast partners.

And now here is Dr. Ciro Ugarte and Dr. Pardis Sabeti.

Thank you both for being with me today. So, this is the debut episode of a three-part series that examines the role of disease surveillance in stopping the next outbreak. I wanted to kick off by having us define our terms a bit. What do we mean by disease surveillance? Pardis, why don’t you go first?

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: When I think of disease surveillance, well, in this context, we’re talking about infectious diseases, and we’re talking about the microbes and the different organisms, what we call pathogens that cause infectious diseases and cause pandemics. We also include in that potential bioweapons, man-made weapons. But it’s basically the things that are moving around that can cause disease that can move from person to person. And how do we find those things and then track those things and respond to them?

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: Just to complement Pardis, in terms of the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health data. So, to monitor the disease occurrence, but also the trends within populations. That’s pretty much...the importance, but also what is done.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Ciro, in terms of like systematically collecting that kind of information, like what’s the information we’re talking about? Where does it come from, and what are you looking for?

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: The information is what is the sources that we use. First is the sources of the ministries of health, the national institutes of health, but also the health systems and networks that are happening in each country. At the regional level, each country provides also the information. And at the global level, it’s also through several other institutions — civilian, military, collaborating centers, NGOs, and others. Essentially, that information that’s related with the disease and the trends, and so on, it’s useful for us to identify early outbreaks, but also to identify the trends of the diseases and also how we can intervene to reduce the health impact in those populations.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And you’re talking, what? About information and data, say, from like national reference labs that might like read a sample and identify a pathogen?

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: Yes, but also from the health services, small health services, large health services, municipalities, and so on. Yes, also, of course, at the highest level of the National Institutes of Health, for example, for the genomic surveillance systems, and so on. But in this case, we’re talking about from the ground to the top level.

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: I think Ciro explains it very well. And I think one of the things that he’s pointing to is just that there’s so many different data sets at every level that are coming in. And I think that is where this work matters a lot. It’s from somebody taking a diagnostic test at home to somebody, you know, being seen in the ER and have a big workup happening to municipalities doing wastewater testing. All of this data, there’s so many different disparate data sets being collected on different platforms by different groups of people. And I think when we think about surveillance, it’s about how do we combine all of that data? How do we bring all the data streams in together?

Because right now it’s very siloed. It’s very bespoke. And within those massive blind spots that’s created, that’s where these infectious diseases get a head start. And we really need to figure out how to integrate all of this. And then beyond those data streams that we’re talking about within clinical networks, it’s just individual actors and the symptoms they’re having that they might be able to share with us on their iPhones or other kinds of environmental data, weather, flights, all of those types of information. How do we use all the data streams to have the most real-time information, and how to stop an outbreak from unfolding?

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Pardis, I’m wondering if you could maybe make this like a little real for us and give an example or two of instances in which a disease surveillance system worked as it ought to have and potentially stopped an outbreak before it metastasized.

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: The last couple of decades now, I’ve been working with my colleague Christian Happi in Nigeria, and together, with a number of partners in West African countries, we’ve created something called Sentinel, which is this type of surveillance system. We talk about three pillars that we have with it. Detect, you know, find ways of detecting pathogens wherever they occur, connect that information in real time, and then empower every actor in the system. And within our own efforts, we work very, very closely. It’s really important that we work closely with the local partners, the local clinicians, and the Nigeria CDC, the Africa CDC. They’re always informed.

We’re working on their behalf, like we’re partners to them, and we recognize that, you know, we are trying to serve them. But together, we have had opportunities where, you know, there was an outbreak unfolding in Nigeria. People didn’t understand what it was. A number of children had gotten sick. We quickly were able to work with the Nigeria CDC, get access to those samples, sequence it, identify it being yellow fever, and then be able to think about, okay, we understand a little bit about how yellow fever transmits, understanding the at-risk populations, making sure vaccinations happen for those who were at risk. So, we had the right information to help public health responders respond in the right and appropriate way. And we’ve seen this time and again.

In Rwanda, we worked with the Ministry of Health there and helped sequence and analyze an unfolding Marburg outbreak. So, it’s that ability to just identify the cases at the first setting and particularly note when there’s clusters that are unusual and bring the right attention, the right technologies to figure out what’s going on and how best to address it.

Mark Leon Goldberg: How does disease surveillance work the same or different, say, in the Americas? And are there examples you could share of how it’s worked successfully to change the course of an outbreak?

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: There are several examples. Actually, the broader surveillance that we do is essentially to prevent those large outbreaks and prevent epidemics and pandemics. And that is through the application of the international health regulations that also provide certain specific areas, times, and problems and situations that must be reported. So, through that, in the Americas, we have currently several health emergencies going on. We have yellow fever, we have measles, we have chikungunya, and also we have cholera and respiratory infectious diseases and others.

And how it works, it works essentially through the network of the information that is being provided by the national authorities. They collect information from the subnational and local levels. They analyze the information, they produce a report, and that report is shared. And those reports provide regional information that also goes through the epidemiologic outbreak updates or epidemiologic alerts. So, with that, all the countries in the Americas, but in the world, also are aware that something is going on.

And also, together with that information, also recommendations of which are the measures that must be taken to early identify those type of cases in the countries, but also how we can implement the control measures and reduce the possibility of becoming a large outbreak or the impacts in the countries. In Haiti, there was a surveillance system that gathered information from the small health villages, but also to analyze what is the quality of water. When those community workers reported that the quality control of the water was showing that it was bad, you know, there was not enough chlorine, for example, immediately the health departments in Haiti deployed their people, their staff, and they were able to control cholera in Haiti for several years already.

So, there are a low number of cases in Haiti, including, of course, as you know very well, all the security issues and all the fragility of the health systems. But through surveillance, we are able to have cholera under control. Not control, but under control.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Pardis, as you and Ciro are describing it, I mean, it sounds to me like a well-functioning surveillance system is one in which you have these disparate networks that are collecting different kinds of information and reporting it through the chain, all somehow communicating and interacting with each other in ways that can inform policy decisions.

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: I think that is the goal. And the question is, how do you get there? And I think you get there by making sure that at the end, you’re serving the local, the frontline. You can’t ask the frontline to share that kind of data all the way up to the public health chain. So, someone, a big decision maker somewhere in the capital city can make a decision if the local responders don’t have what they need. And so, for us, as we think about it, we think about how do we provide the frontline with the information that they need that incentivizes them to give us real time information into the system?

So, you have tools for them immediately where, for example, my own lab has spent a lot of our time, first, trying to democratize genomic sequencing and diagnostics by running a lot of courses to teach more people to do it, bringing sequencers to our partners in Africa, training them to do sequencing. So that was like our first big thing was just like, let’s democratize getting the diagnostics and the sequencing of the data out there. And then when we recognize the next issue is now we need to democratize analytics. You know, you can’t ask them to generate data, but not allow them to get the insights from them.

So, we’ve really been focusing on doing education in bioinformatics and beyond, but also building tools. So, we have a new tool that we’re really excited about. There’s something called Bayesian phylogenetics. It’s a workforce of outbreak response. It’s the way you could get a sense of how quickly the virus is, when it emerged, how it’s spreading. But that was something that was difficult to do, and only a few labs could do it. So, we made this tool so that it runs on a laptop within seconds. Anyone can run it.

So, we want to make sure that those frontline responders actually can generate the data and then get the insights of the data. And then that incentivizes them to make it available to others and share what they’re learning. So, yes, it’s exactly how you describe what you’re trying to get to. And now it’s the thinking of how to get there. And it really is making sure that you are incentivizing and supporting every actor in the system.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Ciro, in terms of that question, how to get there, do surveillance systems all essentially look the same or are there meaningful differences between them? And what would those differences be?

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: There are different systems of surveillance. And also the quality of those types of surveillance are different in the countries and also at the subnational levels. For example, we’re talking about active surveillance that involves actively seeking out of cases of a disease, for example, where the health care workers go to the houses of the population or the communities or actively look at the services particularly. So, to look something that is going on. And it usually is used for stopping an outbreak from going beyond. There is another type that is the passive surveillance. In general, it’s on report of cases in a public health, more or less looking at more cost-effective surveillance, but more or less moving to trends also.

There are other types of surveillance that are called Sentinel surveillance that involves monitoring specific populations on specific diseases because there is not enough capacity to look beyond that. But in particular, it’s also highly particular in particular diseases, and it will provide high quality data on particular diseases. There is also general other types of surveillance like syndromic surveillance that looks at several symptoms other than the disease itself.

So, by tracking symptoms and health indicators, it also provides a general information that what’s going on. If we see large trends, we go and identify why those patients are suffering from those symptoms that are similar in certain areas. But everything that I’m talking about, also Pardis is talking about, is based on trust and also on the capacity of the health systems to identify those trends, those symptoms, those diseases. And in order to do that, we must strengthen that capacity. And also, we’ll have the countries sharing that information in a timely fashion, because if we do not have that trust among the partners, among the networks, it may happen that some countries may have several cases of certain disease – i t is not shared – and it’s identified in other countries when people from one country travel to other places. So, it also happens. But I think we are moving now in the world in a more cohesive way to control diseases together, like one big country that would be the world.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, that actually leads me really nicely into my next question, because I’m curious to learn if the need for disease surveillance systems is something that’s evenly distributed around the world, or if there are certain geographies or maybe types of populations in which disease surveillance would be more needed than others.

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: So, there’s certain things like principles about outbreaks that are kind of unusual and interesting. Like, I often say this idea that, you know, because of the exponential spread of outbreaks, one person can launch a pandemic and therefore one person can stop it. An outbreak can emerge anywhere. And you really do need to make sure that every person is as empowered as possible to respond. And so, fundamentally, we really believe in getting outbreak response tools to everyone. But what is interesting is actually the communities that are the most vulnerable communities, individuals who are refugees or migrants or homeless, or individuals that have autoimmune disease or are immune compromised. They are also at greater risk of getting an infection and therefore spreading an infection, starting a pandemic.

So, I’d say we both need to think equitably because a pandemic can start anywhere and any person can launch it and any person can stop it. But also that it does disproportionately affect the most vulnerable communities. And so, we do actually want those tools and resources in under-resourced settings, in under-resourced populations.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Pardis, understanding, though, that resources are limited, what sort of financial or even like political investments can the international community make to ensure that the kind of robust style of disease surveillance that you discussed earlier can achieve its intended goals?

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: What’s interesting is that outbreaks are one of the most devastating threats to humans, not because of just the untold cost of human lives and human suffering it causes, but also the economic cost. That the Ebola outbreak cost, you know, many billions of dollars and the COVID pandemic led to trillions of dollars of damage. So, you would think that there should be an easy case to be made that if we have major outbreaks like this, every decade at least, but often just every year, every few years, that we should just be investing in better systems.

But for whatever reason, I think it’s the same reason why people don’t appreciate infrastructure until it breaks, and people don’t appreciate infectious diseases until they cause an outbreak. It’s just hard to get people to pay for safety, and for the lack of something happening. We try to get people to understand the need for that type of sustainable support. But what we also do from our side being more practical is we just have been doing a lot of work to drive down the cost. So the things my lab is most excited about now is that you can now run that Bayesian phylogenetics on your laptop. Usually, it takes three weeks and many GPUs, making both the cost and the time, because time actually matters too.

The longer it takes you to catch an outbreak, the more devastating consequences and the more cost there is. So, we always keep talking about drive down cost, drive down time. And so same thing with the diagnostics or sequencing technologies. My lab is now investing a lot of time in driving down the cost of something called metagenomic sequencing, which is the ability to take a sample and test for any pathogen in that sample from what is now, you know, can be over a thousand dollars or at least many hundreds of dollars, now driving it to more of a 10 to $50 range so that we can start putting these into practice. So, governments, it seems like it’s going to be hard-pressed to convince them to spend as much money as it needs. But if we can keep investing in technology to drive down the cost and get it into practice, we can hopefully see more of it.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Ciro, from your perspective, what would be some key investments, financial or political, that would enhance our disease surveillance?

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: Everything that will help the countries and the local communities and the global community to detect timely any trend that is causing a severe health problem must be invested on. It includes, of course, the diagnostic capacity, the laboratory capacity, but it also includes all the systems, the technology that must be in place according to the levels. And regarding why we need that, we need that because for the decision makers to identify which actions must be taken to save their lives, to protect the health of the people, but also to reduce the socioeconomic impact of health emergencies.

And there are several reports on how much does it cost. And it goes from $1 billion to $50 billion worldwide in the investment on the pandemic prevention systems. But of course, several countries may invest more than that in the countries themselves.

Mark Leon Goldberg: I mean, $1 billion to $50 billion is a huge range. Are there capacities or tools that you think we ought to prioritize over others?*

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: Yes, one of them is the laboratory capacity. We need the capacity of the laboratories and laboratory networks in the countries so the early detection of diseases can be made at the centralized level. But also, we need the networks and the systems that will communicate the local level to the national level. And also, we will need investments in new technologies and new medical countermeasures, and also the way to produce, for example, early vaccines or treatments or protective equipment according to those diseases. Those are the main investments that we need to have in order to prevent large outbreaks or epidemics.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Pardis, what are some of the investments that you think ought to be prioritized in the coming months or years ahead?

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: I mean, I think Ciro said it pretty well. Like, I do agree with him that having local capacity to run testing, whatever version that is, it’s going to be incredibly important, and then having that data communicate. Because I think what you saw during COVID is we ran millions and millions of tests and that data was wasted. All the wastewater testing, it was almost like navel gazing. I said a lot of the college testing that we were doing in the United States was not stopping outbreaks. It was just observing them. And so, one of the big things I talk about is this idea of hypothesis-driven testing that we often just run tests opportunistically of who can pay for it and where they happen to be.

But really what we need to do is get smarter systems that can identify who are the people that are at risk, who are the people you might have been in contact with that might be at risk and test them. And there’s a lot we can do, particularly now with artificial intelligence, to get much, much better at mining data that exists already, to take a patient’s clinical information and predict what they have instead of running a battery of wasted tests — know exactly what to test, who to test, and what to test them for. So, I think that there are many ways of driving down the cost of all these technologies, but also using them much more intelligently, what we would call like an intelligent health system that’s a learning health system that is constantly thinking about efficiently detecting the most number of cases and anomalies when they occur.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Ciro and Pardis, thank you so much for your time. This was really helpful.

Dr. Pardis Sabeti: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Ciro Ugarte: Thank you so much.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And, of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive.

Thank you!

*In the audio-version, I erroneously say “$15 billion” instead of “$50 billion” in referring to Ciro Ugarte’s previous comment.

Global Dispatches is partnering with the Global Challenges Foundation for a series of episodes examining how to guard against certain events or scenarios that, should they unfold, would threaten large swaths of humanity across multiple continents. These are often referred to as Global Catastrophic Risks for their potential to disrupt lives and livelihoods on a massive — even planetary — scale. The Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. Global Challenges Foundation’s 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today, including from Weapons of Mass Destruction, the topic of this episode. You can find this report here.

Two of the authors of the chapter on weapons of mass destruction are my interview guests today. Wilfred Wan is director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Michael Wernstedt is acting head of Common Security at the Global Challenges Foundation.

We kick off by discussing how geopolitical and military trends are increasing the risks surrounding weapons of mass destruction, before turning to a longer conversation about how to strengthen international cooperation and global governance to prevent the use of WMDs—and the catastrophe that would entail.

The episode is freely available across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can listen directly below.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Michael Wernstedt: We know from history that sometimes there can be leapfrogs and windows of opportunity, and then it’s vital to have the solutions ready, then we can’t start working on the solutions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Welcome to Global Dispatches, a podcast for the foreign policy and global development communities and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of what is driving events in the world today. I’m your host, Mark Leon Goldberg. I am a veteran international affairs journalist and the editor of UN Dispatch.

Enjoy the show.

Today’s episode is produced in partnership with the Global Challenges Foundation. The Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. Global Challenges Foundation’s 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks Report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today, including from weapons of mass destruction, the topic of this episode. You can find this report at globalchallenges.org/GCR-2026.

Two of the authors of the chapter on weapons of mass destruction are my guests today. Wilfred Wan is director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI. Michael Wernstedt is the Head of Common Security at Global Challenges Foundation. We kick off by discussing how both geopolitical and military trends are increasing the risks around weapons of mass destruction, before turning to a longer conversation about how to strengthen international cooperation and global governance to prevent the use of WMDs and the catastrophe it would entail.

To access other episodes in this series, please visit globaldispatches.org. Now here is my conversation with Wilfred Juan and Michael Wernstedt.

So, we’re here to discuss the catastrophic risk posed by weapons of mass destruction. But WMDs have not just been a catastrophic risk, but really an existential threat for decades. I’m curious to learn from you both what you think distinguishes the dangers of our current geopolitical landscape from other seemingly perilous moments of the nuclear era.

Michael, why don’t you go first?

Michael Wernstedt: If we just zoom out to the geopolitical landscape, I think it’s clear that the 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall has proven to be an exception in history. I grew up in that era, and then I grew up with the narrative that as prosperity would grow, democracy would spread and wars would be a thing of the past. And since a few years, it’s obvious that that is not the case. It was enabled by us having one superpower, among other things. But now we see geopolitical fragmentation and rising geopolitical tensions. And parallel with that, we also see that globalization has not fulfilled the promise of growing prosperity for all, which is called the rise of populism and authoritarian leaders.

And both these things have put a higher pressure and focus on nation states and national security, which has contributed to increased conflicts around the world. And then we can add climate to that, where food scarcity and land scarcity have also contributed to increasing conflicts. And when nations have been threatened, they have more so than in the past feel inclined to abandon the norms that have served us since the Second World War. So, that is the backdrop. And of course, it’s not an extensive list, but it’s a few things at play. And then if we hone in on the nuclear era, in February, the New START agreement expired.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And this was the agreement between Russia and the United States to limit their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. It was the kind of last remaining bilateral nuclear agreement between the United States and Russia.

Michael Wernstedt: Exactly. And that is a successor to previous agreements. And there’s really been agreements for the last 50 years. This is the first time in 50 years that we don’t have that kind of agreement. And the stockpile has been reduced for the last 40 years. But last year was the first time that actually started increasing again. So that is really a shift that we haven’t seen in 40 years. And the second aspect is that the nuclear doctrine has started to change. So historically, we’ve had a commitment to no-first-use. But a number of countries have changed their doctrine, and especially Russia have changed their doctrine, and really played with a nuclear taboo — the taboo that we won’t use nuclear weapon because we know there are no winners if we do.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And Wilfred, it seems that layered on top of this profoundly different geopolitical landscape that Michael just articulated is the changing nature of warfare itself, which seemingly would add an additional risk. And in the Global Challenges Report, you articulated and defined this idea of multi-domain escalation risk. What do you mean by that?

Wilfred Wan: Sure. Let me start by talking about escalation in general, which in this context, means conventional warfare that can escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, whether deliberate or inadvertent. Now, that’s not a new possibility. That was a central concern during the Cold War. But what I would argue is that this possibility is increasing, and that’s because there’s more varied pathways to escalation. And so that’s where the multi-domain of it comes in. So, when we talk about domains, we generally refer to kind of the traditional military operational domains of land, sea, and air. And now we’re including cyber and outer space, as well as information warfare into that.

There’s not necessarily a consensus in terms of kind of the declaration of these as military or operational domains. It’s not ubiquitous or common across states. But multi-domain thinking is just increasingly a part of military operations, of planning, and of some of the doctrines that Michael referred to. So basically, across a number of nuclear-armed states, there’s acknowledgement that conflict will likely unfold across these multiple domains. We are already seeing this in recent and ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, in Iran, with the use of AI, of artificial intelligence, of drones, cyber operations, attacks on space capabilities, all in a coordinated manner.

But this kind of conflict or these kind of operations really complicates the nuclear landscape for a number of reasons. One is that you have more relevant capabilities from a strategic perspective, more relevant capabilities and operations, including capabilities that can make nuclear forces vulnerable.

Mark Leon Goldberg: What would be some of those capabilities that might make a nuclear force vulnerable? And these are capabilities, presumably not like a first strike against another nuclear force with nuclear weapons, but something in one of these other domains?

Wilfred Wan: Yes, exactly. So, you’re talking about things like advanced conventional weapons, missiles, and things like this, where if you have a combination of cyber operations that attacks the adversary’s early warning systems, it makes these missiles capable of performing the same kind of missions that used to be preserved for nuclear weapons. So, a second point is that that you have more states who can expose those vulnerabilities, including non-nuclear armed states, because they possess and deploy these new capabilities, including in terms of cyber operations. So, last June, we saw a number of Ukrainian drones target and damage Russian strategic bombers because these bombers were being used to launch conventional cruise missiles into Ukraine.

But by doing this, they also attacked Russian nuclear forces, which were undermined as a result of the attacks. And in fact, some Russian experts called for a nuclear response to those attacks because of the strategic impact that they had. So, a third point and related is just the entanglement of capabilities in new domains. And what I mean by entanglement is that a lot of these capabilities in space and cyber, they can serve conventional and nuclear missions. They can serve civilian and military missions in a manner that can contribute to confusion or unintended consequences.

So, none of that necessarily means that there will be a nuclear use or nuclear response to these things. But basically, multi-domain operations contribute to greater destabilization and more frequent crises because there’s a lack of agreements on thresholds, on red lines, what would be a proportionate response, and because there’s potential for spillover effects in the context of alliances and strategic partnerships. And all of that, in turn, then impacts on escalation pathways.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, Michael, it would seem that we have both this changed geopolitical landscape, a changed warfare landscape in terms of the ability of nuclear forces to be threatened by nonconventional means and the multi-domain escalatory risk that Wilfred just articulated. Surveying the world today, are there near-term threats that you see where these two trends might collide?

Michael Wernstedt: One aspect that we haven’t touched upon so much is also the development of AI in the military domain and particularly decision support systems. And there we see a rapid development. And I think the big risk that we are all worried about is that an AI system would suggest or even have the autonomy itself to respond to a supposed threat and launch a nuclear attack. And that could, of course, cause unexpected consequences. I think humans still have that sort of ingrained taboo in them that I don’t want to be the first one to start a nuclear war. But there is not a necessity that an AI system would have that.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Because nuclear weapons have been around for so long and because of their existential threat to humanity, there have been attempts, over the decades, to create like an architecture of global governance to control their use, to encourage disarmament. I’m thinking principally right now of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and we’re speaking about a month ahead of the review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which happens every five years, which is an opportunity for member states to gather and discuss ways to strengthen non-proliferation regimes and nuclear security.

But I’m curious to learn from you first, Michael, and then Wilfred, whether these current global architecture or whether this current system of global governance is sufficient to address the complexity of nuclear security today.

Michael Wernstedt: I think it’s helpful in this aspect to look at Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons network, to look at the first horizon with the current government system and see what do we want to preserve there. And then look at the third horizon, which is emerging, to see what do we want to envision in the future. And then look at the second horizon to see what could bridge the gap between the two. In the first horizon, the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, is really a cornerstone. It doesn’t have an expiration date, which is lucky. So, it will continue to exist, even if the review conference is not successful.

However, the legitimacy of the treaty is really at risk if the review conference is not successful, because if the review conference fails, states will be less inclined to respect the treaty. And the last two review conferences have failed, which is unprecedented. So, if the third one failed, and unfortunately it looks a bit bleak given the geopolitical landscape, that will really be risky. And then it is vital that we find the successor to the New START agreement and continue the arms reduction. And then I would also like to add the accountability aspects.

We have the international courts, the International Court of Justice that settles conflicts between state and the International Criminal Court that prosecutes individuals that are charged for crimes against humanity. And it’s vital to protect their integrity and jurisdiction, especially the International Criminal Court has been under massive threat, especially from the U.S. Then if I look at the second horizon, which is slightly further, what can we build? We need a treaty on the use of AI in the military domain. There is a declaration, and 45 countries have signed that declaration, but there is no accountability mechanisms. And of course, there’s no universality of it.

And then we need governance for the mechanisms of multi-domain escalatory risks. And there, I think Wilfred could add more insight into what that would look like. And then there is the TPNW, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. So, the idea of a nuclear weapon-free world. And it might sound utopian, but 95 countries have signed it and 74 ratified it. So, it is there and it is possible. So that’s the content side. And then on the structure side, if I paint the vision, I think we need the global decision making body that could be inspired maybe how the EU works, that we can make decisions by majority decisions.

So, not that one country can block the whole process. But if a majority is for, probably a qualified majority, the legislation can move ahead. And I think in order for that to happen, there needs to be some kind of legitimacy. So, there needs to be probably a represented body with direct representatives, a bit like the EU parliament functions. And this might sound utopian, but I’ve been working with social change for the last 15 years, and I think there are several paths that could lead us there.

I like to look at Everett Rogers’ theory of diffusion of innovation, which is how really innovation can spread in society, but also how ideas can spread in society, where you look at different groups, first the innovators and the early adopters, early majority, late majority, and then the laggers. And rather than trying to convince the laggers, you just look at what group is convinced now, and how can we convince the next group? One example how this is used in another realm is the LBGTQ community in the U.S., where they said, “Okay, let’s stop fight the conservative Christian groups, and let’s instead try to just convince the next group.”

And within two years, they had managed to get same-sex marriage through in 18 states. And of course, we see both on the nuclear side that 95 states have signed. So, we actually have an early majority that is on board already. And on the AI side, we have 45 states that have signed. So, there we have early majorities on board. And then it’s just a question, how do we get the late majority on board? And also, I think another actor that is, or group of actors that is interesting to look at is actually AI company. I think it’s interesting what Anthropic did in relation to Pentagon, where they said, “No, we need guardrails on how our software, our AI is used.” And that could also be a force to be reckoned with if that is an industry-wide initiative.

This is an ongoing slow process, but we know from history that sometimes there can be leapfrogs and windows of opportunity. And then it’s vital to have the solutions ready, then we can’t start working on the solutions. So, I think a bit or a lot of our work is to have the solutions ready. And we have the solutions for the reform of the UN in the Summit of the Future. We have the TPNW, the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We have emerging legislation on the AI. What we don’t have yet is the legislation on multi-domain escalatory risks. And that’s why I think Wilfred’s work is so interesting.

Mark Leon Goldberg: And on that point, Wilfred, what opportunities do you see for systems of international cooperation or global governance to help control or manage the multi-domain escalation risk that you articulated?

Wilfred Wan: Well, let me start by looking more broadly at nuclear governance. And you asked this question of whether the existing global governance structure is sufficient. I mean, it is if it’s being adhered to, if it’s being strengthened and it’s being implemented. Both of you refer to a New START at the beginning of this conversation and the fact that it has expired. But it’s also linked, unfortunately, to kind of a trend over the last few decades in terms of the deterioration of the arms control architecture with withdrawals from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

You look around, there’s discussions about potential resumption of nuclear testing. And compounding the issue as just the greater value placed on nuclear weapons. All of the nuclear armed states are undertaking modernization programs. A number of non-nuclear armed states are leaning more into reliance on nuclear deterrence or having conversations about nuclear sharing. So, we’re heading towards a world where there will likely be more nuclear weapons, less cooperation, let alone information about them. So, when we talk about the NPT, it really rests on this bargain between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon states.

That requires disarmament progress, and we’re not seeing that. So, I think it’s really important to highlight this because that is fundamentally the most effective way of addressing multi-domain escalation risk. At the same time, I do think, while we recognize the difficulty of the strategic environment of the nuclear landscape, there are some near-term opportunities to enhance governance on these issues. There’s value even in like-minded states, for instance, in alliance relationships, exchanging views on threat perceptions, on risk assessment, across multi-domain interactions, to basically establish a common value structure, considering what states see as the roles and strategic valuations of capabilities, or to identify the activities or behaviors that they find especially escalatory, and how the inclusion of cyber and outer space in particular interact with traditional domains of warfare from the perspective of nuclear deterrence.

This kind of exchange is necessary to have future agreements on these kind of issues. In the nuclear risk reduction conversation, there’s a lot of conversation about conflict prevention and conflict management toolkits. So, what I mean by that is the establishment of crisis communication channels, pre-launch notifications, establishment of designated points of contact. And these can be updated more systematically to account for multi-domain interactions. For instance, by covering AI issues, cyber issues, space issues.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Have like a red phone sort of thing for like AI or cyber issues so that the parties have the opportunity to speak directly to each other to reduce any confusion over some unknown event. Kind of like you have in like the nuclear space, at least between Russia and the United States, less so between the United States and China, although that’s trying to be developed and established.

Wilfred Wan: Precisely, to kind of establish these communication channels to prevent misunderstanding, misinterpretation. Now, some of these channels across certain countries exist, but it’s quite inconsistent, as you flag, to increase military-to-military dialogue on these issues as well. But when we talk about kind of more longer-term aspects, there needs to be a more holistic approach to nuclear risk. And this requires a more forward-looking approach to dealing with strategic technologies. So, to give you an example, scientific and technological developments are being considered by working groups by permanent bodies in the Chemical Weapons Convention, in the Biological Weapons Convention, and in the Nuclear Ban Treaty, the TPNW that Michael referred to.

But it’s not considered in the NPT, which is the nearly universal nuclear treaty. Developments across domains, across capabilities, fundamentally are changing how nuclear weapons are being thought about and when they’re being considered for use. And so these developments absolutely need to be considered, whether through a regular review of these developments, these technological advances, through more interactions across these different UN processes that are quite siloed in how they tackle these issues, through more inclusive engagement with the private sector and industry, and Michael gave the great example of anthropic.

Or just simply more explicit discussion about multi-domain risk. It often feels like military thinking around newer domains, how best to use related capabilities to achieve battlefield victories, to bolster deterrence, etc., tends to outpace thinking about how these same actions could be misperceived or reacted to or what accompanying risk is. And so, in this context, the push for first mover advantage, that is states wanting to take advantage of these technologies to win, can also mean that there is an unearned confidence in our ability to control or manage escalation. So, I think the point that I want to end with here is just a need to be a bit more humble in how we think about these things and recognize the uncertainties that exist.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, I’d like to conclude by learning from both of you what potential near-term opportunities you see in the coming months or years to implement some of these ideas around governing either multi-domain risk or weapons of mass destruction more broadly. Are there some like kind of diplomatic moments coming up where some of these ideas might be productively advanced?

Michael Wernstedt: I mean, the first clear opportunity is in the next month with the NPT review conference. So, that is a real clear opportunity. And then there are a number of initiatives on the AI domain. So we have the responsible AI in the military domain initiative that we are also in discussion with, which I see is one initiative. And then I think, as I mentioned, that there could also be private initiatives with Anthropic leading the example.

Wilfred Wan: I would also start with the NPT Review Conference. And while AI issues have been discussed briefly in that context, it’s been primarily limited to integration of AI in nuclear command control and communication systems. And yet there are so many other ways in which AI can contribute to thinking around nuclear weapons. And so, I think the Review Conference is an opportunity to really expand that conversation about AI, but also to look at some of these other domains and activities around them. The second opportunity I would point to is the convening of the open-ended working group on space security issues. And the next meeting will take place in July of this year.

So, to, again, connect outer space issues to strategic stability and broader issues concerning nuclear risk, I think, is really important, again, to my point about de-siloing conversations. The last thing I would say that hasn’t come up so much in our conversation so far, but I want to highlight, is the need to discuss these things at a regional and sub-regional contexts. Because ultimately, when you talk about WMD, when you talk about valuation of nuclear weapons, and so forth, these issues don’t exist in a vacuum, and they’re linked to underlying regional, sub-regional security concerns and sub-regional and security environments. And so, to explore how these capabilities and these operations take form in those settings can be a concrete way to move forward.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Michael and Wilfred, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciated your contributions to this report. Thank you.

Michael Wernstedt: Thank you so much.

Wilfred Wan: Thank you so much.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive. Thank you.

Southern Lebanon has long been a fraught and contested zone for Israel.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 in response to cross-border attacks by Palestinian militants and occupied much of southern Lebanon for 18 years, until the IDF withdrew in 2000. Six years after that, Israel re-invaded Lebanon as part of a broader military campaign against Hezbollah. Israel (mostly) withdrew that same year as part of a United Nations-brokered ceasefire that included the deployment of thousands of UN peacekeepers to the region. However, following the October 7 attacks and Hezbollah’s decision to join the fight, Israel deployed troops across the border once again. Then, in November 2025, Israel and a severely weakened Hezbollah entered a ceasefire agreement, which mostly held until the outbreak of the Iran War on February 28.

Israel is now back in Lebanon—and the tactics it is using are highly reminiscent of its military campaign in Gaza.

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Later in the show, we examine why the United States is standing alone at the Commission on the Status of Women, casting lone “no” votes on a host of measures intended to promote gender equality. Finally, we discuss the newest entrant in the race to replace António Guterres as secretary-general, Virginia Gamba, and how her nomination may shake up the race.

The full episode is available immediately below the fold for our paying subscribers. You can support our work at full price or get a discount subscription using the button below.

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After the fold, and for paying subscribers, we examine why the United States is standing virtually alone at the Commission on the Status of Women, casting lone “no” votes on a host of measures intended to promote gender equality. Finally, we…

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At the moment, there seems to be no way out. The United States and Israel are continuing their relentless bombing campaigns. Iran is retaliating against countries in the region and summoning the best geopolitical lever it has: preventing oil tankers from crossing the strait. As a result, the cost of food around the world is poised to go up—which, for millions of people, can mean not eating.

Believe it or not, this is familiar territory for the United Nations.

Back in early 2022, the world was faced with a similar dilemma following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which all but halted Ukrainian agricultural exports. That had a huge impact on global food supplies. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine accounted for roughly half of global sunflower oil exports and about 10–17% of global exports of wheat and maize. The shock to those supplies hit import-dependent regions especially hard, particularly the Middle East and parts of Africa, helping drive a global food price spike.

At issue was the inability of civilian cargo ships to collect Ukraine’s vast agricultural exports and deliver them to the rest of the world without fear of attack. In the early spring, the UN began to work behind the scenes to find a solution: what would become known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

Under this agreement, merchant ships intending to pick up or offload Ukrainian grain would first transit to Turkey, where a team of Ukrainian, Russian, and Turkish inspectors would examine the ship under the watchful eye of UN officials. Once cleared, the ships could travel along an agreed maritime corridor without threat. The agreement worked: sufficient Ukrainian agricultural exports re-entered the world market, reducing a major strain on global food supplies. And Russia got what it wanted, too, with the lifting of restrictions on its own fertilizer and agricultural exports.

The context of the Black Sea in 2022 and the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 is different, but the outline the Black Sea Grain Initiative provides may show a path forward on Hormuz—and some key international diplomats are starting to take notice.

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The Trump administration has been ratcheting up pressure on the island, including by imposing an oil embargo that is strangling the country’s energy supplies. On Monday, March 16, Cuba experienced a complete collapse of its electric grid, triggering a nationwide blackout. Meanwhile, Cuba’s erstwhile major patron was Venezuela, which, since the ouster of Maduro, no longer provides the support on which Havana once relied. Recent reporting also indicates that Washington and Havana are now engaged in direct talks, even as the Trump administration is explicitly seeking the ouster of President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Trump has also publicly suggested he could “take” Cuba.

So will Cuba go the way of Venezuela? What role does the U.S. war in Iran play in Washington’s policy toward Cuba? And might the Cuban regime survive after all?

My interview guest today, James Bosworth, answers these questions and more. He writes the Latin America Risk Report here on Substack, and we kick off with a brief overview of seven decades of U.S.-Cuba relations before having a longer conversation about where things stand today — and where they may be headed.

This episode is free for everyone. Though if you appreciate these kind of in-depth and nuanced interviews I conduct each week, please get a paid subscription to keep this show going strong.

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The consequences of these risks are terrible, involving unimaginable levels of death and destruction. But while these dangers are very real, they are not inevitable. They can be prevented.

Global Dispatches is partnering with the Global Challenges Foundation for a series of episodes examining how to guard against these catastrophic risks. The Foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. Global Challenges Foundation’s 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today, including catastrophic climate change, the topic of this episode. You can find this report here.

Two of the authors of the chapter on catastrophic climate change are my guests today. Manjana Milkoreit is a researcher of earth systems governance at the University of Oslo. Eva Mineur is head of climate and sustainability at Global Challenges Foundation.

We kick off by discussing what we mean by “catastrophic” climate change and examining examples of this phenomenon already underway around the world, before turning to a longer conversation about how to strengthen international cooperation and global governance to prevent catastrophic climate change—and the calamity it would entail.

The episode is freely available across all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can listen directly below.

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Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, climate change is obviously part of our vernacular at this point, but catastrophic climate change has not yet been central to discussions more broadly of climate change. What is catastrophic climate change, and what distinguishes it from climate change as we know it today, Eva?

Eva Mineur: When we talk about climate change today, it’s part of everyday language. And we talk about, you know, hotter summers and stronger storms and rising seas and so. But it’s often framed as something gradual, something that we can manage and adopt to step by step. And I would say that catastrophic climate change is different. The key difference is about the scale and the reversibility. It’s not just more warming. It’s warming that pushes parts of the Earth system past the thresholds, what we call tipping points, where change becomes self-reinforcing and potentially irreversible on human timescales.

I mean, in the normal framing of climate change, we assume a more or less sort of linear relationship. You know, more emissions creates more warming, creates more damage. Catastrophic climate change breaks that logic. It happens when the warming triggers large-scale shifts in the system, and that can undermine food systems, water supplies, infrastructure, even political stability. The short version is that regular climate change means intensifying impact, but catastrophic climate change means systemic destabilization.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So this concept of tipping points is central to what distinguishes catastrophic climate change from climate change kind of as we know it conventionally. Manjana, what are some of those tipping points that might induce catastrophe?

Manjana Milkoreit: It might help to start with a bit of a definition of what climate tipping points refer to. They’re actually referring to large-scale systemic shifts in major components of the Earth system. A climate tipping point is usually a threshold in one of those large components of the Earth system where previously gradual change starts to trigger a self-reinforcing, accelerating shift towards a different state of that system. And states are very abstract terms, but you can think about this, for example, with an ice sheet, major ice sheets that have existed on the planet for millions of years could melt down and disappear for, again, millions of years into the future.

Or you could think of, for example, the Amazon rainforest as one of those examples that could currently exist and has existed for millions of years in the state of a highly biodiverse, self-sustaining rainforest system that could transition, even on a basin scale, to a savanna or kind of grasslands, so fundamentally different type of system that does very different things with huge implications for human well-being. These types of changes can accelerate existing change because of these self-amplifying feedbacks that I mentioned, so things would happen faster.

They exist and they happen at really large scale, sometimes crossing multiple continents, which means they can affect lots of people and lots of regions around the world at the same time. They create systemic changes, so reorganizations of the earth system and consequently the human systems that depend on them. And that can mean that they overwhelm our adaptive abilities. Rather than just being trends towards making things harder, they really fundamentally change how we relate to nature and our stability goes with it. And they can be irreversible on timelines that matter for us humans.

So, they create a permanence in the kind of change that can fix these problems. What makes them probably even more challenging is that they exist in a connection that enables tipping point cascades. And that means that if one tipping point happens, that in some instances that can make additional future tipping points more likely. So, one tipping point can enable a tipping cascade. And that is what creates fundamental, large-scale, systemic, maybe catastrophic risks for humans in multiple dimensions.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Yeah, I’d love to learn a little bit to kind of ground the conversation in a way that I think makes me personally understand this better as well, presumably, as the audience. What are some examples of what a tipping point might be? Let’s just kind of walk through a few of them. Eva, why don’t you go first?

Eva Mineur: I can choose an example that I think is one of the clearest examples of this happening right now, and that is the coral reefs that we have. They are extremely sensitive to temperature. I mean, just a small increase, one or two degrees of the seawater temperature can actually trigger bleaching. And the corals expel the algae that give them energy. And if the heat continues, the coral will eventually die. And in the past, the reefs had actually decades to recover between the bleaching events. But now marine heat waves are so frequent that reefs don’t get the recovery time. And that’s a critical shift, you know, from temporary stress of a system to a chronic stress.

And climate change isn’t just harming the reefs. I mean, you could say it’s removing their ability to regenerate due to the process I just described. And when the reefs collapse, the consequences don’t stay underwater. Fish stocks decline and coastal protection weakens and tourism economies may suffer and eventually food security worsens, etc. And in some regions, that increases pressure to migrate even. So, you start to see how ecological change actually spills over or creates ripple effects into social and economic systems. And that is what makes it a catastrophic risk.

The coral reef issue is actually happening right now in front of our eyes. And it’s really, really worrying what we can see there.

Manjana Milkoreit: Over the last 20 years, science has identified an increasing number of those potential tipping systems or tipping elements, as they’re sometimes called. So, we started out in about 2008, I think, with a list of eight of those systems. And over time, like now, we think about 15 to 20 of those systems. In addition to the coral reefs, a number of the key systems identified include other major biomes, the Amazon rainforest, but also the boreal forests are potential tipping elements. Then we often include a number of the major ice sheets on the planet. The West Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet are key examples of tipping elements that might have a very approximate tipping point.

But then also systems like ocean currents, the Atlantic overturning circulation, or smaller ocean currents, or permafrost somewhat is another one. So, there’s tipping elements that are very diverse in their nature that exist in different parts of the Earth system, both terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, these are catastrophic events because they impact people and human survival, potentially at very large scales. Manjana, can you just describe a bit the human impact of some of these tipping points being crossed? What does it mean for people?

Manjana Milkoreit: Eva already explained why the coral reefs are so important and have such huge implications for a lot of people. Currently, about 500 million people in the world depend directly on coral reefs for their food, for their income, for coastal protection, and other things. So, there’s a huge amount of people distributed around the whole planet that depend on coral reefs for their well-being and are threatened by their loss. Maybe we can take another example, the Amazon rainforest. The rainforest itself, about 40 million people live within the rainforest. If the Amazon rainforest were to move across a tipping point, suffered quite immediate consequences from this in terms of forest loss and biodiversity loss, fire and health effects, the loss of their ways of life when it comes to indigenous peoples, maybe replacement and migration pressures.

But there would also then be a large set of more regional implications because the Amazon so strongly shapes water availability and water flow within or on the South American continent. So, you would have impacts on agriculture within all of South America. You would have impacts on water dependent energy systems. And in addition to these already additional 300, 400 million people affected by those impacts, you would also have feedback to global warming, a planetary impact, because once the Amazon dies back, you have additional CO2 emissions that would increase global warming and speed that up.

So, everybody on the planet would be affected by that. So, I think the Amazon is a really interesting second example for what makes these tipping dynamics so challenging and potentially catastrophic. So, we could also talk about the Atlantic Overturning Circulation, also called the AMOC. So, that is an ocean circulation that spans both hemispheres and transports heat from the global south to the global north. It’s responsible for keeping Europe, for example, and it’s nice moderate climate that we have today. And the AMOC has, in the planet’s history, collapsed a number of times, broken down. And scientists are currently concerned that this could happen again.

So, we see, we observe signs that indicate that the circulation might be slowing down and weakening. And there’s a potential that over 50 to 100 years, it might come to a standstill. And that would have major consequences, different ones in all parts of the world. It would start with significant cooling, especially in Northern Europe, an opposing impact compared to expectations of warming right now. It also would mean that more heat would remain in the Southern Hemisphere, making warming there even worse than it is at the moment.

It would also have significant implications for the distribution of rain and water around the world because the AMOC connects or controls rainfall systems and the monsoon. So, it might introduce interruptions to global important monsoon systems in West Africa, the Indian monsoon or the Southeast Asian monsoon. And that, of course, is immediately important for agriculture and food production, and therefore for food security across multiple continents, possibly at the same time.

So, if that were to happen, that you have these interruptions to rainfall, more volatility, or even rain moving to different locations than it was before, you could see major interruptions of global food security, which is, of course, linked through trade, which is why lots of people are really concerned about that particular tipping element.

Mark Leon Goldberg: So, there has been for many years, at this point, systems of climate governance at the global level. We do have like global governance on climate issues between the COP process, the IPCC, and other mechanisms of international cooperation to confront climate change. Yet these structures are obviously insufficient to confront, at least now, the kind of catastrophic climate change that you’ve just described. I’d love to learn, Eva, from you, your diagnosis of why that is, why are our systems of global governance insufficient to confront the potential catastrophic climate change that you’ve both just described?

Eva Mineur: Yes, here’s the frustrating part, because as you say, we do have climate governance. We have the UN Climate Framework. We have the Paris Agreement from 2015. We have national climate plans. We have scientific bodies, etc. But it’s obvious that these institutions, they were largely built for gradual change and not for preventing tipping points. And there are several problems of why they are not delivering at the moment. Not speaking about, you know, the whole what is happening on the geopolitical level at the moment, but of course, first, the commitments within the global climate architecture are mostly voluntary.

So, countries set their own targets. Unfortunately, we have seen that enforcement is very weak. So, this is a huge problem. On the other hand, that was how it had to be set up when the Paris Agreement was set up, because if you wouldn’t have had this voluntary mechanism, there wouldn’t have been an agreement at all. But here we are. The enforcement is very weak. Second, governance is fragmented. I mean, climate, biodiversity, land use, oceans, etc. are negotiated separately and dealt with separately, even though the tipping points connect them, as Manjana illustrated.

And a third reason is that the political time horizons are really short. Election cycles last, you know, it’s just a few years in between. However, the ice sheets, they destabilize over centuries. And here’s a very, very big mismatch in terms of time horizons. And fourth, climate risks is not treated as a systemic stability issue at all. I mean, there are no binding ecological red lines and no global institutions is tasked specifically with safeguarding Earth system resilience. So, I mean, we are governing a non-linear planet with institutions designed for linear change. I think that is the major reason for a governance failure. But then we also, of course, have what is happening around the world at the moment.

Manjana Milkoreit: Of course, the existing and rather complex infrastructure for climate change governance in the world wasn’t designed for non-linear change or large scale disruptions like tipping points. And so therefore, some of these problems that we’re describing right now are just fundamental and pre-existing troubles and challenges for the climate governance system, independent of this new set of maybe catastrophic climate risks. So, collective action problems, the time horizons don’t match. It’s built for linearity and it’s fragmented, not looking at systems, but looking at kind of silos.

So, all of these problems exist independent of this novel set of catastrophic risks and tipping points. And maybe therefore I would add two things. One is that these tipping elements create a particular set of troubles or challenges because they require us to think over these long time horizons in a very anticipatory way. Because we have here this kind of change where you have a threshold, a particular moment of commitment to long-term future change, to system reorganizations, it is just of utmost importance to act before you reach that threshold, so to act in a precautionary, anticipatory, preparedness kind of way before you hit that threshold, not in a reacting kind of way.

Our CIS-governance systems are much better at reacting to observable change than to anticipate and act before something happens. I think that will be our core challenge in this situation where it really becomes about avoiding that moment of hitting the threshold and moving past it when that system reorganization on large scales becomes unstoppable. And so, these anticipatory and precautionary action logics do not actually work very well in our current system of governance, where national interests are kind of the core logic that structures everything.

Our international institutions are kind of collecting and bringing together multiple, often divergent national interests on short-term horizons and do not actually perform the function of taking care of the public good or creating system stability. Nobody is uniquely just in charge of that. And so, I think that’s where some of the real challenge sits here, in addition to the fact that we’re dealing with significant amounts of uncertainty, much larger uncertainty than with climate change as such when it comes to these tipping dynamics, where we, for example, cannot say specifically where, in time these, tipping points sit or what specifically will be their impacts over time. That creates particular action challenges in the institutions that we have.

Mark Leon Goldberg: What can be done and how can a system of global governance be constructed or reformed or introduced one way or another to have that kind of anticipatory function that you describe and confront catastrophic climate change?

Eva Mineur: I would just like to briefly talk about the thing that I don’t think that many people know about, but I think it’s really, really important because it has to do with this governance failure. I call it the legitimacy paradox. And it’s a deeper political problem that I think that we really, really need to know about. So, two years ago, the UNDP and the University of Oxford conducted the world’s largest public opinion survey on climate change, and it covered more than 70,000 people across nearly 80 countries, representing 87% percent of the world’s population. And the findings were striking.

I mean, 89% want stronger climate action from governments, 72% support a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, 81% support protection and restoring nature, and 79% supports climate justice, meaning richer countries should help poorer countries address climate impacts. So, it’s obviously clear that people are worried and they want action. And yet, politically, climate is often downplayed in favor of security concerns, a lot of that at the moment, but also the AI, economic competitiveness, short-term cost of living issues, etc. This is a paradox. We have a public concern worldwide which is high, we have scientific evidence which is very strong, but we have a political system that moves very, very slowly. And this gap between public concern and political responses create this legitimacy problem.

I think part of the reason is the framing. Climate policy is often framed as a cost or even a sacrifice rather than an investment in long-term stability. And political incentives remain skewed towards the present, as Manjana also pointed out. But I think that when citizens see that long-term risks are acknowledged but not addressed, that erodes the trust. And trust is the foundation of legitimacy. So, what can be done? And that is, of course, to accelerate the decarbonization and defend critical thresholds. We need to draw ecological red lines. And that means we have to protect the remaining primary forests.

We have to stop expanding fossil fuel production. We have to limit warmings as much as possible. It may sound radical, but it’s not radical. It’s pure risk management. And just to mention, the upcoming Colombia Santa Marta process in the end of April, which is linked to the COP30 process, this is a coalition of willing quite many countries that are committed to try to find a way or actually to, in the end, I believe, to sign or to create a treaty to actually phase out fossil fuels. And this is happening this year in the end of April. And there’s a lot of parties and states and civil society organizations, scientists, etc., that will join forces into this process. And I think it’s a good example of leadership when the consensus diplomacy at the COP process stalls.

If global agreements cannot move fast enough, maybe coalitions can. So, I think this is a really interesting example and a reason for hope. And the other strategy or what I would like to see more is, of course, to integrate the climate with finance and security. We just said that this is handled in silos, but it shouldn’t be. I mean, it’s obvious the climate is a financial stability issue, is also a national security issue, is a development priority. So, if you could embed climate risk into financial regulation or infrastructure planning, defense strategies, and development finance, etc., I believe that responses scale faster. Markets move trillions faster than environmental ministries move billions. So, I think that would be to actually see climate risk as a systemic risk and build it into the financial and security institutions. Maybe political momentum could change, or probably it would.

Manjana Milkoreit: One thing that is really important and maybe often gets a bit lost in these conversations about how hard it is to address tipping point risks and non-linear risks is that we actually have an existing architecture that might have its weaknesses, but we have governance tools. And when it comes to preventing tipping points, we have much of the solution potential already at our hands. So, we know that increasing global temperature is the key driver for almost all of these tipping dynamics.

And that limiting warming is our key solution. So, it comes back to being able to accelerate mitigation action decarbonization with a logic that tries to prevent these tipping points. So, we need to be able to accelerate these solutions. And we have many of these things in place through the Paris Agreement architecture, through the expanding availability of renewable energy, through all kinds of multi-scale processes that facilitate mitigation. It’s very clear that one thing that becomes important to minimize tipping risks is to limit the overshoot of 1.5 degrees Celsius. And we need to limit the time we spend above 1.5 because this is a very important temperature threshold that significantly increases the risks of passing a number of these tipping points that I mentioned before.

So, we want to come back below 1.5 as soon as possible. And that requires that, in addition to our emission mitigation toolkit, we rapidly engage in expansion of negative carbon or carbon removal technologies. This is a new set of technologies and tools that will be necessary to come back down from peak temperature. But just to say, a big set of solutions exists and we should not just fold our hands and say this is too big and too terrible and we can’t do anything unless we create new institutions. No, we have a set of governance institutions and responses that work, that need improvement, that need acceleration, but there is something there to work with. So, that’s not despair.

And then if you want me to address maybe also how can we think about governance institution reform to be better prepared or to be better able to respond to catastrophic risks like climate tipping points, I think there’s probably three things. We need to significantly increase our ability to act in an anticipatory fashion. So, our foresight, early warning capacities, and the precautionary logic need to come into our institutional architectures much more strongly so that we have the capacity to recognize and have shared understandings of the possible future risks that are coming and the kinds of futures that might be possible and the kinds of pathways that can avoid them.

So, this kind of ability to imagine futures is kind of core to these anticipatory modes of governance. So, that means we need institutions that can represent the future, maybe also in procedural or mechanistic terms because of this temporal mismatch that we’re meeting here, where these tipping processes occur over decades and centuries, but our decision-making cycles always move only in years or maybe five to ten-year cycles. So, how do we build in the representation of the interests of future generations in our decision making? That could be fiscal rules, that can be advisory bodies who represent future generations, other forms of deliberation or policymaking logics that bring much more extended time horizons into the policymaking process itself.

And third, governance probably has to become much more systemic or systems aware. We have to think about not just agriculture and finance, security in separate silos, but think about the integration between those. So, it’s not about the one single perfect treaty, but coordination, integration between different policy systems and domains, connecting them, connecting climate and biodiversity, water and agriculture, and so forth, so that we create a better patchwork and connectivity between multiple policy domains and institutions. So, I think a key capacity for addressing climate tipping points and other catastrophic risks is imagination and collective imagination.

And by that, I don’t mean creative capacity for fantasy, but the institutional and collective ability to anticipate futures that do not yet exist and to organize our responses and actions around those possible futures.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Manjana, Eva, thank you so much for your time. I learned a lot from this conversation. This was really helpful.

Eva Mineur: Thank you so much.

Manjana Milkoreit: Thanks, Mark, for inviting us to do this.

Mark Leon Goldberg: Thanks for listening to Global Dispatches. The show is produced by me, Mark Leon Goldberg. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts, make sure to follow the show and enable automatic downloads to get new episodes as soon as they’re released. On Spotify, tap the bell icon to get a notification when we publish new episodes. And of course, please visit globaldispatches.org to get on our free mailing list, get in touch with me, and access our full archive.

Thank you!

Lebanon is where the humanitarian crisis stemming from the Iran war is most urgent at the moment—but the fallout is rapidly spreading across the region. In Gaza, humanitarian aid has dropped dramatically following Israel’s decision to close a major crossing. Pakistan is bracing for refugees even as it is in the midst of its own war with the Taliban, and in Iran itself, more than 3 million people are reportedly displaced.

But according to my guest today, the impact of this conflict on some of the world’s most vulnerable people will be felt far beyond the region. Scott Paul is the Director of Peace and Security at Oxfam America. We begin by discussing the various crises this war has sparked across the region before turning to a broader conversation about the impact this conflict will have on humanitarian operations worldwide.

In short, the ability of local and international humanitarian organizations to meet the basic needs of millions of people around the world has just become substantially more difficult because of this war.

Watch and listen to learn why.

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