Our lives are changing at an unprecedented pace.
Transformational shifts in our economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological systems offer unparalleled opportunities, but the interconnections among them also imply enhanced systemic risks. Stakeholders from across business, government and civil society face an evolving imperative in understanding and managing emerging global risks which, by definition, respect no national boundaries.
Conceptual models are needed to define, characterize and measure the potential negative impacts of interconnected global risks. It is in this spirit that I present the Global Risks 2014 report, now in its ninth edition.
This report aims to enhance our understanding of how a comprehensive set of global risks is evolving, how their interaction can lead to unexpected and often systemic impacts, and the trade-offs involved in managing them.
Global Risks 2014 is a stimulus for reflection for policy-makers, chief executive officers, senior executives and thought leaders around the world.
It is also a call to action to improve international efforts at coordination and collaboration, going beyond the traditional roles and responsibilities of the public and private sectors to equip institutions to understand, map, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks.
The report emphasizes the importance of understanding systemic risks, long-term thinking to address and Preface mitigate them and the critical role of the younger generation. To do so, it offers deep-dive analytical insights into interconnected risks with the potential to have systemic consequences in the geopolitical, socio-economic and digital spheres.
The report also features an analysis of a survey of over 700 leaders and decision-makers from the World Economic Forum’s global multistakeholder community on 31 selected global risks. For the first time, survey respondents were asked directly to nominate their risks of highest concern, which placed economic and social issues firmly at the top.