Global Risks Report 2024 

Businesses face increasingly complex risks and systemic turbulence, which complicates short-term decision-making and long-term strategies. The eruption of armed conflicts in many regions, record-breaking extreme weather, continuing cost of living pressures, the rise of generative AI are all contributing to feelings of instability and uncertainty. As organizations continue to implement major advanced technology, sustainability, and resilience programs, they will need to consider preemptive and responsive approaches.

The Global Risks Report can help organizations understand and act on today's critical risks and identify trends and improve preparedness for tomorrow's. The Global Risks Report is produced annually by the World Economic Forum with the support of Marsh McLennan and other partners.

The 2024 Global Risks Report highlights the challenges we face managing complex risks in a world undergoing fundamental climate, technological, geopolitical, economic, and societal transformations. In the near term, certain risks may worsen and reach an inflection point, including those related to AI, climate, and the economy. This could result in significant disruptions and dislocations that organizations must be prepared for, even if their exact nature is unknown.

In the long term, we need to be ready for shocks that could erode progress on critical risks and upend global prosperity. This could include climate change adaptation failures or even erratic advanced technology behaviors. In an increasingly fragmented and volatile world, if we can overcome obstacles to private-public sector corporation, we can significantly move the needle on many risk vulnerabilities and improve our resilience at organizational, country, and international levels.

There's a strong consensus around the top near-term global risk concerns. These include technology-fueled misinformation and disinformation, extreme weather events, societal polarization, cyber insecurity, and interstate armed conflict. In the long term, environmental and technological risks remain at the forefront, with potentially irreversible climate change and adverse AI-related outcomes firmly in the top 10.

The report also addresses emerging risk challenges that could push the world past a tipping point. These include inadequate climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, destabilizing powerful technologies, constrained community development, and increasing global criminality. Building effective long-term resilience at a time of technological, climate, geopolitical, economic, and societal transition while potentially entering a new era of risk poses a critical challenge for risk professionals, senior leaders, board members, and many others.

Through creative approaches and greater cooperation on risk, intersecting crises, and the trajectories they drive, businesses, governments, and societal stakeholders can reduce uncertainty, improve risk investment decision-making and responses, and build long-term resilience on a planetary scale. I encourage you to reference this year's Global Risks Report, as you refine and calibrate your strategic approach to today's risks, emerging threats, and growth opportunities.

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