From the people at the World Economic Forum, the wonky global thinkers responsible for the yearly Davos conference, comes a new report that reinforces many of the world’s greatest worries over the past year: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, public debt is at catastrophic levels and weather is getting weirder.
For the second year in a row, the biggest global risks are income inequality, government debt and rising greenhouse gases, according to the panel of 1,000 industry and government experts the WEF interviewed. But the risks that will have the most impact are systemic financial failure, government debt and crises in the water supply:
Two of those risks are interrelated. Although many say a total eurozone destruction is now not likely, the prospect of its collapse was sparked by one of the other WEF risks, a “failure to redress excessive government debt obligations,” as Forum puts it.
Though the risks mostly stayed the same from last year’s report, respondents this year saw them as more likely to happen and as having a higher impact.
“Two storms — environmental and economic — are on a collision course,” said John Drzik, the head of Oliver Wyman Group and one of the experts surveyed for the report.
Water risk made headlines during the drought that scorched countries around the world last summer, but it’s actually a much broader issue that causes unique problems in different countries, according to Rob Kimball, an associate at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank.
“For some communities it’s as basic as drinking water availability, or unsustainable groundwater extraction leading to the intrusion of saltwater, particularly in coastal areas like those near California and the Gulf of Mexico” he said. “But drinking water is just a tiny bit of the puzzle – 70 percent of the water we consume around the world is used for agriculture.”
Elsewhere, water risks touches everything from shipping to electricity production. The Mississippi River, for example, is already so low after this year’s drought that there’s a chance cargo vessels soon won’t be able to navigate a section of it, which could potentially affect even global commodity markets. In India, low rainfall reduced hydroelectric capacity and increased pressure on the electric grid, contributing to widespread blackouts over the summer.
Developed in partnership with the editors of Nature, a leading science journal, the chapter on “X Factors” looks beyond the landscape of 50 global risks to alert decision-makers to five emerging game-changers:
Runaway climate change: Is it possible that we have already passed a point of no return and that Earth’s atmosphere is tipping rapidly into an inhospitable state?
Significant cognitive enhancement: Ethical dilemmas akin to doping in sports could start to extend into daily working life; an arms race in the neural “enhancement” of combat troops could also ensue.
Rogue deployment of geoengineering: Technology is now being developed to manipulate the climate; a state or private individual could use it unilaterally.
Costs of living longer: Medical advances are prolonging life, but long-term palliative care is expensive. Covering the costs associated with old age could be a struggle.
Discovery of alien life: Proof of life elsewhere in the universe could have profound psychological implications for human belief systems.
washingtonpost