The economic global recovery to accelerate over the next three years, a poll of nearly 1,000 business, government and academic leaders found, with only one in six optimistic about the world outlook. Global leaders must come together and adopt a coordinated multi-stakeholder approach to tackle unrelenting global challenges and build resilience ahead of the next crisis. In the next five years, economic risks of debt crises and geoeconomic confrontations emerge as governments struggle to balance fiscal priorities. While the long-term top five is dominated by environmental risks. But amid all the bleak predictions, there’s still reason to hope for more positive outcomes, with the Global Risks Report 2022 including lessons in resilience from the COVID-19 pandemic, advice for cooperation in space, greater cyber resilience and a more sequenced climate transition.
In fact, the experts and leaders were not altogether hopeful about the outlook for the world, with less than 16% of respondents to the GRPS ‘optimistic’ or ‘positive’, with the vast majority (84.2%) ‘concerned’ or ‘worried’. By 2024, developing economies (except China) will have fallen 5.5% below their pre-pandemic expected GDP growth, while advanced economies will have surpassed it by 0.9%. Such global divergence will impact on the world’s ability to tackle common challenges including climate change, enhancing digital safety, restoring livelihoods and societal cohesion, and managing competition in space.
Widening disparities within and between countries will not only make it more difficult to control COVID-19 and its variants, but will also risk stalling, if not reversing, joint action against shared threats that the world cannot afford to overlook. The risk horizon changes over the coming years, as the full implications of the pandemic become clearer. In the next two years, risk experts and leaders see the erosion of social cohesion, the deterioration of mental health, infectious diseases and livelihood crises as being equal to environmental threats – which are constant across the short to long term. Societal risks make up a third of the global top 10, with societal cohesion erosion and livelihood crises completing the top five, while infectious diseases come lower down at number six.
Most respondents to the survey believe too little is being done: 77% said international efforts to mitigate climate change have not started or are in early development.
Two years on from the first COVID-19 cases, countries are reporting record infections due to the Omicron variant, but the pandemic pales compared to the long-term risks the world faces from climate change. This is the sobering view of nearly 1,000 risk experts and global leaders in business, government and civil society in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022.
Climate change is seen as the number one danger by respondents in the WEF’s annual risks report, while erosion of social cohesion, livelihood crises and mental health deterioration are identified as risks which had increased the most since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Extreme weather is considered the world’s biggest risk in the short term and a failure of climate action in the medium and long term – two to 10 years.
Agreement at the UN COP26 climate conference in November last year was widely applauded for keeping alive prospects of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, but many of the nearly 200 nations had wanted to leave the conference in Glasgow with more. Climate change is already seen contributing to more extreme weather patterns.
Failure to act on climate change could shrink global GDP by one-sixth and the commitments taken at COP26 are still not enough to achieve the 1.5 (degrees Celsius). The WEF’s report also highlights four areas of emerging risk cybersecurity, a disorderly climate transition, migration pressures and competition in space. The prospect of 70,000 satellite launches in coming decades, in addition to space tourism, raises risks of collisions and increasing debris in space, amid a lack of regulation. .
