For the year ahead, environmental risks top the list, climate foremost among them, alongside cybersecurity, in the wake of massive corporate data breaches, as well as election meddling and cyber-sabotage around the world.
The survey (pdf) collected about 760 responses in late 2017 from specialists in business, government, academia, non-profits, and international institutions. Respondents were asked to assess, on a scale of 1 to 5, the global likelihood and potential impact of a list of risk factors. While every global region was represented, 65% of responses came from Europe and North America.
At the heart of humanities’ challenges is social instability. The fragmenting of societies and international cooperation inhibits our ability to tackle systemic problems. The report finds the world has become “remarkably adept” at mitigating conventional risks, likely referring to disasters such as infrastructure failures or airline collisions, “we are much less competent when it comes to dealing with complex risks in the interconnected systems that underpin our world, such as organizations, economies, societies and the environment.”
Hi, Can the data that has been collected in the past, now be overlayed and shown in a way that illustrates the ‘change over time’ in our rating of various risks?