Daniel Treisman: What are some of the biggest existential risks that we are facing on the planet right now? We either through biodiversity loss, or climate change, ocean asitification, or other kinds of effects on our biosphere, we create a biosphere that is uninhabitable to humans. But surprisingly, most of these things, if we have more intel about them, many of them can be avoided, or at least mitigated against. When we look at what happened in syria, we see that a major part of it was factoring out environmental cascades.