What is a living literature review?

Hey there, I’m Florian, and here I run a constantly updated literature review about societal collapse. You can find the review here, but if you want to join in on the conversation, feel free to check out Existential Crunch where you can comment and subscribe to the newsletter.

The idea behind this project is to make research on societal collapse more accessible to anyone who’s interested in the topic. If I come across new information that changes any of my previous conclusions, I’ll update the review here. This also means that I greatly appreciate if you send papers which might be relevant to the posts you will read here.

Who is writing it?

A little about me - I have a PhD in environmental science, but in recent years I have switched more to existential risk research, though still from an environmental perspective. For example, I have done research about the focus of the IPCC. Besides this formal education, I also have been very interested in all things history for decades. Combining these skills lead me to this project here, as societal collapse often works through interactions of human behaviour and environmental factors. If you want to learn about me and my work, just scroll down and you find links to all the places I regularly post or follow this link to my personal webpage.

Funding

The project is funded by Open Phil. They are also looking for more people who would be interested in working on such a living literature review for a variety of topics. More info here.

Acknowledgement

Over the time a lot of people have helped me with feedback on my posts. I try to keep this list up to date, but please remind me if I overlooked you here. Thanks for very valuable feedback on a variety of the posts here!

Luke Kemp
Ekaterina Ilin
Danilo Brozović
Nico Wunderling
Matt Clancy
Sabin Roman
Markus Stoffel
Constantin Arnscheidt
David Denkenberger
Matt Boyd
Rachel Ainsworth
Peter Søgaard Jørgensen
Michael Hinge
Simon Blouin
Daniel Hoyer
Juan B. García Martínez
Andreas Schmidt