Climate and technology will be the primary drivers of short- and long-term global risks, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024.
The report, unveiled on Wednesday, indicates that individual and collective actions coupled with national strategies and international coordination are the ways to confront these challenges.
As artificial intelligence tools become widely accessible in a year filled with global elections, the 1,400 contributing experts view misinformation as the main concern over the next two years.
Widespread use of misinformation and disinformation, and the tools available to spread them, can undermine the legitimacy of newly-elected governments, the experts stress.
They predict that the resulting disturbances could range from violent protests and hate crimes to civil confrontations and terrorism.
Amid ongoing global conflicts, particularly in Ukraine and the Middle-East, interstate armed conflicts are considered the fifth biggest source of concern over the next two years. However, they drop from the ranking in the longer term.
On a ten-year timeline, environmental risks emerge as the greatest concern, while technology-related risks decline but remain in the top ten.
Long-term, five of the ten most significant global risk sources are environmental, with four occupying top spots. These are extreme weather events, critical changes to the Earth’s environmental systems, biodiversity loss, and scarcity of natural resources.
The findings present predominantly negative short-term outlooks for the world, which are expected to worsen in the long term, the report concludes.
