How have the world's risks changed in the past 20 years, and how might they change again in the years ahead?
The 'World in Numbers: Risks' session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos.
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- The 20th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report highlighted state-based armed conflict as the biggest risk facing the world this year, but how have risk perceptions changed over the past two decades?
- In the World in Numbers: Risks session at Davos, two experts drew on an archive of Global Risks Reports to note that environmental risks have become the greatest source of long-term concern – and that several particular societal risks have ranked above average over the past two decades.
- They also suggested that a blurring of lines between risk categories is taking place, as the threats facing the world become increasingly interconnected.
- Tackling these risks will require pushing back against de-globalization, they said, and concerted and collective multi-stakeholder efforts are the best means to build mutually acceptable solutions.
“The world has changed profoundly over the last 20 years and will continue to do so in unpredictable ways,” says Mark Elsner, Head of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Initiative, in the preface to the Forum’s latest Global Risks Report.
This year marks the 20th edition of the Global Risks Report. Perceptions of the biggest threats facing humankind – and the planet itself – have shifted over time, though a few have remained top of mind.
Various environmental risks have consistently topped the list of threats for the decade ahead, with many individual risks within this category rising rapidly up the rankings. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse leaped from 37th place in 2009 to second this year; critical change to Earth systems moved from 21st in 2013 to enter the top 10 in the following year – and it has never left.
“Environmental risks have steadily consolidated their position as the greatest source of long-term concern,” Elsner says. But he adds that “this year’s Global Risks Perception Survey shows that a sense of alarm is also mounting in the shorter term; environmental problems, from extreme weather to pollution, are here now – and the need to implement solutions is urgent.”
Conflict has also been seen as a perennial risk; its jump to the top of short-term threats in the 2025 report is consistent with past trends. When wars are taking place – as is the case now – state-based armed conflict has climbed higher on the risk horizon. This happened in 2010, when 15 armed conflicts were under way worldwide, and in 2014-15, at the time of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Donbas, Ukraine, and the escalation of the war in Syria.
The World in Numbers: Risks session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos on January 22 saw two leading experts – Samir Saran, president of the Observer Research Foundation, and Bronwen Maddox, director and chief executive of Chatham House – draw on the historical archive of Global Risks Reports to explore the evolution of risk perceptions over the past two decades. Here are the highlights of their discussion.
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Economic risks don’t add up
Economic concerns may loom large in the 2020s – thanks to the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a resulting surge in inflation and interest rates which has yet to be fully tamed. Yet, they don’t feature in the top 10 of this year’s Global Risks Report – for either the two-year, or the ten-year outlook. This is not an outlier.
Economic risks have generally placed lower as risks on the 10-year horizon over the past 20 years, with only two exceptions that ranked above average: debt (corporate, public, household), and asset bubble burst (which surged due to the 2007-08 global financial crisis but then subsided as the global economy stabilised).
“These two economic risks have remained consistent and worthy of some concern,” said Saran. “But largely – maybe it is human nature – there has been a slightly optimistic skew when looking at economic risks. The world is more optimistic on the economic side than I am.”
For Maddox, this optimism is not comforting. “I am concerned with the way people have portrayed economic risk here, as we have a lot of economic risk at the moment disguised by conflicts, whether in the Middle East or Ukraine.
“Economic growth is proving very hard for governments to get hold of. Mature democracies are finding it extremely hard to work out what to do, and it is fusing so quickly with politics that it is very easy to jump to talk about the politics without thinking that, at heart, these are economic problems; how to run a mature country, how to get people to pay tax, and so on.”
Saran agreed with this blurring and crossover of risk perceptions in the reports. He said that “risks associated with economic well-being such as inequality and lack of economic opportunity are being captured in societal risks,” rather than in economic risks.
Stable and unstable risks
This perhaps explains why, as Saran pointed out at the start of the session, for the full 20 years of the Global Risks Report, “societal risks clearly rank on top”.
Several societal risks have ranked above average over the past two decades, including inequality and societal polarization, with the latter rising steadily in recent years, from 21st at its introduction in 2012 to 8th this year on the 10-year outlook.
“These are something all of us have lived through,” Saran added. “We see it in our elections, our debates, our commentaries.”
Lack of economic opportunity has also historically ranked highly; both it and inequality “form a spectrum of concerns that are agitated in our minds and the media most often”, Saran suggested.
In contrast to societal risks, perceptions of technological risks have been among the most volatile in the 20 years of the Global Risks Report. However, this could be the area to watch most closely for unexpected future-risk developments. Even the first edition of the report, in 2006, noted that there were a number of potential risks associated with new technologies.
Chief among technology-related risks this year is misinformation and disinformation, which tops the list of two-year risks; but there are other worries, too.
“Censorship and surveillance is an area of concern across various editions,” Saran noted. “And one of the big questions we are dealing with more recently is what could emerging technologies [such as] AI do to our societies, our elections, our democracies, our engagements with each other.
“The presence of the digital is creating insecurity in society,” he added. “Innovation is happening at such a clip that we have not been able to invest in critical analysis of what it is doing to us as people. We are going blind into a brand new age.”
Risks that are being overshadowed
Another blind spot, according to Maddox, is nuclear proliferation.
“It’s back again,” she said (as explored by the Resurgent Hazard of Nuclear Weapons session at Davos), “but much of the world has forgotten or doesn’t know the peculiar horror of those weapons.”
Maddox also talked about how getting past the headline rankings, and digging deep into the later sections of Global Risks Reports, reveals intriguing and important details on a more local level.
“If you go into the country-by-country reporting, where people are concerned, for example, about water, they are really, really concerned. It is right at the top. In countries where environmental concerns are hitting home, there is almost nothing more important.”
Drilling into the details on environmental action reveals another area that merits closer attention, according to Saran. “We have very strong partnerships and collaborations on generating and mobilizing climate finance, and yet we have not done that well in mitigating emissions. One of the reasons is that developing nations are just not receiving enough of a share of climate finance.
“More than two-thirds of future emissions are going to happen out of these geographies, and yet less than 20% of climate finance reaches these geographies. There is an asymmetry that needs to be responded to.”
How is the World Economic Forum fighting the climate crisis?
Today’s risks – and their solutions – all are interconnected
The increasingly interconnected nature of the risks the world faces today – a phenomenon that Saran refers to as a “clustering effect” – is making them not just more complex to address, but also more urgent.
As the preface to this year’s report notes, the past 20 years have shown us that when it comes to managing and mitigating risks, “concerted and collective efforts of multi-stakeholder leaders helped to build common ground, compromises and mutually acceptable solutions”.
The same will hold true for the years ahead. Which is why, when asked about the biggest long-term risk she is worried about, Maddox raised economic fragmentation.
“Deglobalization matters. It chips away at the prosperity we have enjoyed as a global community, even if everyone hasn’t felt it, over the last 30 years. Things that threaten growth, even if they aren’t wars or a big collapse in a particular market, they so immediately hurt prosperity – particularly for the world’s poorest – and make all these political problems and social strains much harder to tackle, including the environment and energy.”
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