Orbital Debris
A cascade in low earth orbit would take out the systems everything else depends on.
Severity score
44.0
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Satellite constellations and debris from anti-satellite tests have crowded low earth orbit. A collisional cascade would degrade the navigation, weather, communications and disaster-warning capabilities that modern economies and emergency response rely on, and there is no cleanup mechanism.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
4Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
60People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
70Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
44Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
72Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.