These are world leaders' top 3 concerns, according to AI analysis of their speeches

“It’s a small world” – how often have we said and heard those words? Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now revealed that we do really live in a small world when it comes to the issues that concern us the most. This is the finding of a study by the United Nations’ (UN) global communications department, which used AI to analyse 178 speeches made by world leaders at the last UN General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2023.

Not surprisingly, the climate, development and peace were the topmost concerns expressed. A word cloud diagram representing the most widely used terms further showed “cooperation” and “security” as major recurrent themes across all speeches made.

These themes are also prevalent in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023, which polled risk management experts for their assessment of the biggest global issues over the next decade.

The climate and climate change-related concerns such as natural disasters, extreme weather, and biodiversity and ecosystem erosion feature prominently in both short and long-term forecasts. The same applies to peace and security, as reflected in experts’ concerns over geopolitical confrontation. Conflict and climate impact are among the reasons cited for large-scale involuntary migration, which also features among the global risks the report anticipates.

Beyond the overarching global findings, the UN team also explored the differences between regions.

Speakers from Africa equally emphasized the climate, development and security but their most prominent topic was the continent itself.

This may not be surprising considering that Africa is deeply affected by many global issues.

The Global Risks Report 2023 points to risks such as droughts and water shortages, which may lead to a decline in harvests and livestock deaths across Africa and exacerbate food insecurity. Climate change is also expected to emerge as a key reason for migration, the report says, and may also contribute to the emergence of conflicts due, for example, to constrained resources.

Alongside the global themes, leaders from the Asia and Pacific region had a strong focus on cooperation in common.

This may reflect their awareness of the risks associated with eroding geopolitical cooperation, which the Global Risks Report portrays as a potential contributing factor to a future polycrisis such as a “resource war”. “Ineffectiveness of multilateral institutions and international cooperation” was ranked among the top 15 concerns for risk experts over the next decade.

Tops themes for Latin America and the Caribbean aligned with the global focus on climate, development and peace.

Stressing the importance of development and how other risk factors can impact it, the Global Risks Report points to the 1980s as a “lost decade” of development in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. A cycle of sovereign debt defaults, currency and output collapses as well as cost of living crises ultimately led to economic and humanitarian crises.

Understandably for Eastern European speakers at UNGA 2023, their speeches were dominated by the war in Ukraine and recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Geoeconomic confrontation and its impacts were one of the biggest short-term concerns for the global risk experts surveyed by the World Economic Forum. It ranked third in expected severity within the two-year horizon but dropped to ninth place when experts were asked for their predictions for the next decade.

For Europe and the rest of the world, the AI analysis of UNGA speeches revealed that climate and peace were leaders’ key themes. However, concerns over human rights, AI and the war in Ukraine.

The growing influence of AI is also a topic for the World Economic Forum risk experts. They highlighted that technological risks such as adverse outcomes of “frontier technologies” – including AI – are expected to deteriorate over the next 10 years, along with digital inequality and lack of access to digital services.

Both the UN’s AI analysis and the Global Risks Report suggest that many of the concerns and perceived risks for the future are highly interconnected and could potentially cause future crises. Looking at the key themes across regions, “cooperation” features heavily and may lie at the heart of averting them.