What’s worrying the world in 2022?
We are pleased to share with you the 17th edition of the Global Risks Report, published by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Marsh McLennan. The Global Risks Report 2022 examines how global divergence across multiple domains in the post-COVID-19 recovery threatens to widen disparities and aggravate societal fractures.
Drawing upon insights from over 950 experts and decision-makers worldwide, the report unpacks some of the critical global tensions that risk worsening the pandemic’s cascading impacts and complicating the coordination needed to tackle common challenges that include strengthening climate action, enhancing digital safety, restoring livelihoods and societal cohesion, and managing competition in space. It concludes with reflections on enhancing national and organizational resilience, informed by lessons from year two of the pandemic.
Some key takeaways include:
- Disparities in progress on vaccination are creating a divergent economic recovery that risks compounding pre-existing social cleavages and geopolitical tensions. These tensions and the economic overhang of the pandemic will make it difficult to ensure a coordinated and sufficiently rapid approach to global challenges.
- Mounting conviction for a fast climate transition is being slowed by social, political, and economic complexities, which risks creating a kaleidoscope of net-zero trajectories—each with different speeds and complications. A disorderly climate transition with divergent approaches could trigger economic volatility and further drive apart countries and bifurcate societies.
- Converging technological platforms, tools, and interfaces connected via an internet that is rapidly shifting to version 3.0 are at once creating a more complex cyberthreat landscape and a growing number of critical failure points. Attacks on large and strategic systems could carry cascading physical consequences across societies, while prevention will inevitably entail higher costs.
- Challenges relating to forced displacement in ‘origin’ countries are clashing with greater protectionism in ‘destination’ countries. Constraints on normal patterns of mobility risk aggravating global insecurity, worsening humanitarian crises, exacerbating international tensions, and stirring immigrant skepticism and social unrest among populations.
- A greater number and variety of actors operating in space could generate frictions if space exploration and exploitation are not undertaken responsibly. With limited and outdated global governance in place to regulate space alongside diverging national-level policies, risks are intensifying around militarization and escalating geopolitical tensions.
- The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened thinking about how organizations can leverage different capabilities and strategies to enhance resilience and align that with other objectives. Moreover, multiple collaboration opportunities exist for governments, businesses, and communities to pursue a whole-of-society approach that will improve national preparedness for the many types of crisis on the horizon.
We hope you find the Global Risks Report 2022 informative and useful. We look forward to discussing how we can help your organization respond to the concerns addressed.
Download the report
Sincerly,
Luc Verbiest
Country Manager Marsh Luxembourg
