According to the newly released United Nations Global Risk Report 2026, the world is facing a changing, crowded, complex threat landscape. Drawing on a survey of 1,300 stakeholders across governments, businesses, civil society, and the UN system, the report paints a sobering picture of the current resilience posture and the vulnerabilities we face.
The most striking shift since the inaugural 2024 report is the meteoric rise of political risks. Large-scale war is now viewed not as a distant threat, but a relatively immediate one. 36% of respondents expect a large-scale war to start within just one year, and 76% believe it will happen within seven years.
Alongside war, geopolitical tensions and the collapse of the rule of law have emerged as highly critical, interconnected nodes driving the broader risk network. However, while political and technological threats – such as AI, frontier technologies, and technology-driven power concentration – have surged, environmental risks remain foundational. Climate change inaction continues to hold its position as the single most important global risk overall, acting as a strong driver for cascading crises like natural resource shortages.
Conversely, six years on from the onset of COVID-19, fears surrounding biorisks and new pandemics have plummeted, falling completely out of the top ten risks across all seven global regions.
A crisis of preparedness and funding
For resilience and risk professionals, the report’s assessment of global preparedness offers a stark warning. While stakeholders believe multilateral institutions are relatively capable of identifying risks, confidence in their ability to actually reduce them has declined for 23 out of the 28 tracked risks over the past two years.
Funding remains a critical, systemic bottleneck. According to the report, 86% of stakeholders view funding for risk mitigation and reduction as definitively inadequate. Funding shortfalls extend across the entire resilience lifecycle, with 79% deeming disaster recovery and reconstruction resources inadequate, and 76% saying the same for disaster response.
