Notes

Starting from the Pact for the Future, this article maps fourteen global catastrophic and existential risks and three risk multipliers, and inventories the multilateral institutions that exist to assess, regulate, finance and enforce the reduction of each. No risk is fully covered; most are partially covered; some are not covered at all.

The Montreal Protocol is the treaty most often cited as proof that coordinated global action on a planetary risk is possible. This note looks at what actually made it work, and at how much of that is transferable to the risks now in front of us. The honest answer is: less than the analogy usually implies.

United Nations projects operate under privileges and immunities that sit uneasily beside the national legal orders of the countries they serve. This note asks what compliance should mean in practice when the two regimes point in different directions, and argues for a working rule that is neither blanket deference nor blanket exemption.