The present paper critically addresses the problem complex of management of catastrophic and global risks from a holistic perspective. It assesses the practice of dealing with large scale and catastrophic risks; offers a definition of catastrophic risks relative to the societies they affect; and discusses the nature of global catastrophic risks in terms of scale and randomness, with a special view on the decisive factors for their predictability, their temporal and spatial evolution and their manageability. In this context, it is argued that systemic risks such as perception biases constitute the most severe threat to sustainable societal developments. A framework for risk informed decision making is then outlined, which specifically addresses robustness and adaptability of decisions in the face of the large uncertainties associated with societal developments and non-ergodic hazard processes. Subsequently, the issue of how society may decide to allocate economic resources to deal with catastrophic risks is discussed from the perspective of individual nations as well as in the context of supra-national resource allocation. Finally, possible instruments for the governance of global catastrophic risks are outlined and discussed.
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