The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 has been released. It explores some of the most severe risks currently faced by organizations, individuals, and nations and how the threatscape is expected to develop over the next decade.
The Global Risks Report 2024 warns that against a backdrop of systemic shifts in global power dynamics global risks are stretching the world’s adaptative capacity to its limit. Two-thirds of global experts consulted for the report anticipate a multipolar or fragmented order to take shape over the next decade, ‘in which middle and great powers contest and set – but also enforce – new rules and norms’.
Pessimistically, the report’s results highlight a predominantly negative outlook for the world in the short term that is expected to worsen over the long term. While 30 percent of global experts expect an elevated chance of global catastrophes in the next two years, nearly two thirds expect this over the next 10 years.
The 2024 and 2025 risk landscape
Concerns over a persistent cost-of-living crisis and the intertwined risks of misinformation and disinformation, and societal polarization dominated the risks outlook for 2024.
The growing concern about misinformation and disinformation is in large part driven by the potential for AI, in the hands of bad actors, to flood global information systems with false narratives, says the report.
The nexus between falsified information and societal unrest will take centre stage amid elections in several major economies that are set to take place in the next two years.
Interstate armed conflict is a top five concern over the next two years. With several live conflicts under way, underlying geopolitical tensions and corroding societal resilience are creating conflict contagion.
The report calls on leaders to rethink action to address global risks and recommends focusing global cooperation on rapidly building guardrails for the most disruptive emerging risks, such as agreements addressing the integration of AI in conflict decision-making. However, the report also explores other types of action that need not be exclusively dependent on cross-border cooperation, such as shoring up individual and state resilience through digital literacy campaigns on misinformation and disinformation, or fostering greater research and development on climate modelling and technologies with the potential to speed up the energy transition, with both public and private sectors playing a role.
The top risks
Experts were asked to estimate the likely impact (severity) of various risks over a two-year and ten-year period. The top five risks for each period are seen as:
Two years
- Misinformation and disinformation
- Extreme weather events
- Societal polarization
- Cyber insecurity
- Interstate armed conflict
Ten years
- Extreme weather events
- Critical changes to Earth systems
- Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse
- Natural resource shortages
- Misinformation and disinformation
The top long term risks are all linked to environmental issues and changes.
