Global Risks 2012: a glimpse at the perils threatening our world

What are the risks that keep you awake at night? Whether you worry about missing a flight or a mortgage payment, the chances are that asset bubbles, cyberattacks and pandemic disease* don’t feature. The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network, though, monitors the various risks that may not be foremost on people’s minds, but that pose significant threats to the way we live.

The Network’s annual report, published tomorrow, offers a snapshot of how 469 industry leaders and experts perceive the evolving, interconnected risks that cut across society, the economy, the environment, geopolitics and technology. After the tumultuous events of 2011, the report will make pertinent reading.

The Global Risks 2012 report is published against a backdrop of a lingering Eurozone debt crisis, massive social change rippling through the Arab world, the unprecedented use of online networks to precipitate change, as well as the aftermath of a combined natural and nuclear disaster in Japan. A specific chapter on the latter will outline some of the risk leadership lessons that can be gleaned from this crisis.

The report, the seventh of its kind, analyses risks over a 10-year timeframe, highlighting the most significant threats to humanity over this period and some outlying “X Factor” risks; the wild card threats that warrant more research. The aim isn’t to make specific predictions, but to gain awareness of the risk landscape to improve the frameworks for risk anticipation and response.

Nevertheless, in the past, the Forum’s risk network has provided tantalizing glimpses of what did indeed turn out to be around the corner. At the Annual Meeting 2006 in Davos, an economic risk group listed, among its concerns, asset bubbles, the massive misallocation of capital (e.g. the US property market) and a fiscal crisis in the industrialized countries.

What looming risks will show up on the radar this time round? You can find out at 11.00 CET tomorrow when the report goes live. We’ll publish a blog post with the main findings on the Forum:Blog, along with a link to the report itself, in a beautiful (if we say so ourselves) online reader format, replete with graphics. Tune in throughout the week for video interviews with some of the experts who shaped the report, as well as a series of “What If…?” blog posts, exploring some far-fetched, frightening but ultimately plausible risk scenarios.

You can find out more about the work of the Risk Response Network in the video below.

Any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

*Please note that these risks aren’t necessarily the findings of the Global Risks 2012 report – which is under embargo – but just some general examples of the sort of things the report analyses. 

Pictured: A girl prays for victims of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Otsuchicho. A special chapter of the Global Risks 2012 report is dedicated to the disaster.