The Risks and Resilience Fund exists so that donors can support high-impact work which is focused on reducing global catastrophic risks. It relies on the best available evidence and expertise. Our research team allocates it according to the recommendations of the evaluators and grantmakers we have assessed and trust in this cause area. Since 2023, that has meant two organisations: Effective Altruism (EA) Funds, through its Long-Term Future Fund, and Longview Philanthropy, through its Emerging Challenges Fund.
Both funds are closing. This post explains what both closures mean for our recommendations in this cause area, and explains how we plan to allocate the Risks and Resilience Fund in response.
Recently, EA Funds has closed the Long-Term Future Fund and launched the Transformative AI Fund in its place. While the Transformative AI Fund has a similar remit to the Long-Term Future Fund, it is explicitly a new fund, with an altered scope and new team. As a result, we do not think we can rely on our evaluation of the Long-Term Future Fund for decisions about whether to rely on the Transformative AI Fund.
Longview Philanthropy is also closing the Emerging Challenges Fund. They share the reasoning behind this change in their announcement post. Accordingly, the fund has been removed from our platform.
With these closures, our recommendations in this cause area are changing.
We think our evaluations of evaluators offer unique value in helping donors differentiate between the opportunities available. We would have preferred to complete several evaluations in global catastrophic risks in 2026, to renew recommendations in this area. However, of the eight potential evaluators we approached, only one was available and ready to be evaluated: Longview’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund. We’ve started evaluating this fund, and aim to have results ready by December.
In early 2027, when more evaluators are ready to be evaluated, we will run a set of evaluations to rebuild the breadth of our recommendations in this area. EA Funds has already agreed to an evaluation of their new Transformative AI Fund, which will by then should have a grantmaking track record we can evaluate. There are several other candidate evaluators that we would be excited to evaluate and which may be ready by then, but have not yet been confirmed.
Donations made to the Risks and Resilience Fund that we receive before October 2026 will still be allocated to the Emerging Challenges Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund. This is because, in this period, we believe both retain the grantmaking capacity to deploy the funding well:
For donations from October onwards, our allocation depends on what our evaluations find.
If we decide to rely on the Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund, it will become a recommendation donors can give to directly, and we will likely allocate a share of the Risks and Resilience Fund to it on the usual schedule. However, nuclear weapons policy is just one route to reducing catastrophic risk and we aim for our cause area funds to serve donors with a diversity of worldviews. For this reason, we do not expect to allocate 100% of the Q4 balance of the Risks and Resilience Fund to the Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund.
The remainder — or the whole balance, if we decide not to rely on the Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund — will be granted once our early 2027 evaluations conclude. From Q2 2027, we expect to return to the usual quarterly grantmaking cycle.
We think awaiting results from our early 2027 evaluations is more consistent with ensuring donors can be confident their money is going to highly effective opportunities according to a broad range of worldviews than making a less informed allocation sooner.
While we are prioritising identifying additional evaluators we can rely on in early 2027, we remain open to the possibility that we don’t identify any options following our 2027 round of evaluations. Our evaluations ask whether an evaluator is among the most cost-effective places a donor can give in a cause area, and that answer can be no.
If this happens, we expect the research team will allocate the fund's balance directly to other opportunities we have strong reason to believe are highly impactful, in consultation with a variety of experts working in the cause area, until we have identified evaluators we can rely on in this space.
We think the Risks and Resilience Fund remains the best publicly available option for donors who want their giving to track the latest research on where donations do the most good in reducing global catastrophic risk, particularly where donors are sympathetic to a wider array of worldviews about how best to have an impact in this space.
However, for donors who want to engage more deeply themselves, want their donations to be allocated sooner, and/or have a particular worldview, we list several promising alternative options on our donation platform, including: Founders Pledge’s Global Catastrophic Risks Fund; EA Funds Transformative AI Fund; and Longview’s Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund. As we haven’t yet evaluated these funds we don’t currently recommend them, but they are candidates for future evaluation and recommendation.