The goal of the SurvivalScores project is to provide a clear overview of humanity's progress towards protecting the survival of our species.
There is perhaps no problem more deserving of our attention than the ongoing risk of human extinction. What task could be more important than ensuring that our children and grandchildren don't have their lives ended prematurely by a global catastrophe? Yet our international politics seems adrift and unfocused, allowing significant risks of nuclear war, global pandemic, and environmental catastrophe to linger unaddressed without the appropriate urgency.
We need a way to get back on track. When one works on any problem, establishing metrics for success can be helpful in focusing and orienting our efforts. Whether it's the score in a competitive game, one's grades at school, or the total in one's bank account: we all understand that metrics are a fundamental part of establishing what's important and incentivizing members of our community to work in a particular direction.
Making use of this insight, SurvivalScores publishes a daily scoreboard showing to what degree each national government is participating in existing international treaties that serve as existential hygiene to reduce the risk of global catastrophe. At a glance, everyone can see which countries have made good progress in protecting humanity's survival, and which countries are neglecting their responsibilities.
SurvivalScores was created with the hope that a scoreboard can help to concentrate our attention on these key treaties, and promote efforts to push lagging national governments to ratify them.
International cooperation is necessary to address the existential risks to humanity. That's because an extinction-level threat to human survival could emerge from any individual country or region, whether through war, environmental degradation, viral outbreak or hostile AI, and expand to threaten the globe.
The primary venue for international cooperation is the United Nations, and the instrument through which long-term cooperation is typically established and coordinated is the international treaty. SurvivalScores.org presents a daily snapshot of the current state of international treaties critical to the survival of humanity.
The degree to which countries have signed and ratified these critical treaties can be seen as a direct measure of our species' progress towards mitigating existential threats. SurvivalScores.org provides a table indicating which treaties have been ratified by each country, using data updated every day from public UN databases. If a country has joined a treaty, it earns a 
; if a country is not yet a member of treaty, it is given a 
. Each country is also assigned a crude score, which is simply a count of how many critical treaties that country has already joined.
The SurvivalScores table is intended to serve as a global public resource that helps citizens hold governments accountable for their policies with respect to human survival.
To ensure that the human species continues, we humans need to establish a system of worldwide constraints to reduce the likelihood of the mass destruction of our species or our civilization. Destruction could take the form of a natural event (such as an asteroid impact), or a human-initiated incident, whether deliberate or accidental.
SurvivalScores focuses on the most likely forms of human extinction or near-extinction. These include:
- Nuclear war
- Pandemic
- Ecosystem collapse
- Hostile artificial intelligence
While we don't know the exact probabilities of these threats, it is plausible that any of them could cause the destruction of the human species in the coming decades. (This approach excludes things that are extremely harmful but aren't existential threats, such as chemical weapons and landmines.)
Fortunately, international treaties have already been established that address most of these threats. Not all nations participate in every treaty, however; the failure of governments to join these treaties presents an ongoing existential threat to us all.
Following is a brief description of each of these threats and the relevant treaties, tracked by SurvivalScores.
The threat of nuclear war is ongoing: ten countries possess nuclear weapons and others are trying to obtain them. It's widely understood that a major nuclear war could kill hundreds of millions or billions of people and end civilization.
Over the decades, a number of treaties have been created at the UN to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war. The SurvivalScores project focuses on major treaties that appear to be the most likely to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war:
- The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)
- The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)
- The Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)
- Membership of Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZ)
It is quite likely that nuclear war could arise from the escalation of a conventional war. In addition, the threat of conventional war is one of the reasons that some states maintain a nuclear deterrent. Unfortunately, the Security Dilemma implies that a nuclear deterrent maintained by one state for defensive purposes can be perceived by other states as an offensive nuclear threat. Therefore, SecurityScores tracks treaties that provide an alternative deterrent to aggressive war:
- The Rome Statute, establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), which punishes, and thus deters, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- The Kampala Amendments to the Rome Statute, adding the Crime of Aggression to the ICC's jurisdiction, to deter the military invasion of one state by another.
The danger of pandemics has become all too familiar in the world following the experience of COVID-19. Two possible sources of pathogens threatening human survival are worth considering: natural evolution and human engineering.
The category of human-engineered pandemics includes both the deliberate spread of pathogens and the accidental leaks from laboratories.
The development of bioweapons, pathogens intended for war, is prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention, an international treaty tracked by SurvivalScores.
Accidentally engineered pathogens and natural pathogens are also important potential sources of civilization-endangering pandemics. The World Health Organization has primary responsibility for protecting the world against such pandemics. All nations apart from Liechtenstein are members of the WHO, and Liechtenstein cooperates with the WHO, so SurvivalScores table doesn't currently include membership of this organization.
An international agreement to prohibit gain-of-function engineering of pathogens also seems advisable, and if one is created in the future, its participation will be monitored by SurvivalScores.
The threat of collapse of large numbers of species or whole ecosystems is not merely a threat to Earth's natural heritage, but also a threat to the survival of the human species. Humanity's reliance on nature for its sustenance is indisputable and complex: we can't risk allowing the destruction of our ecological support system.
To measure international commitment to combating this risk, SurvivalScores includes the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. These two treaties represent fundamental measures that all countries should jointly take to reduce humanity's devastating impact on the global ecosystem.
The danger of artificial intelligence (AI) is only now emerging. No UN treaties currently address this danger, but there is an ongoing effort to develop international restrictions on the development and use of autonomous weapons. Once such a treaty exists, it will be added to the SurvivalScores table. Additionally, international agreements to ensure AI remains under the control of humans are also likely to be necessary.
International politics and the trajectory of history is by its nature unpredictable and impossible to reduce to a simple formula. Obviously, the simple formula used in this project, assigning national governments a score for their contribution to human survival, does not represent the complex dynamics of international politics and technological progress. In reality, many more factors will be important to how the future plays out.
Nevertheless, SurvivalScores is built with the view that a simple readout can be helpful to focus on the basics: on international efforts towards the universal ratification of treaties that are fundamental to addressing threats to survival of human beings and our civilization.
Discussion, debate and disagreement is encouraged! Not everyone will agree that treaties are the right approach to reduce humanity's risk of extinction or near extinction. Others may argue that the treaties tracked by this project are not the right ones. It's important to listen to those voices with an open mind. Let's keep all discussions respectful and kind even when disagreements are strong.
SurvivalScores.org is an independent project created by Arthur Edelstein. Source code can be found here.