A risky business
Authors: None The Lancet Planetary Health
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2024)

Identifying the most pressing societal issues and prioritizing and coordinating action requires contextual judgements about global politics and dynamics and the risk and enabling landscape actors are operating within. What is most important and deserving of action now and into the future? Although the choices are not a zero-sum game—action in one area doesn’t automatically detract from action elsewhere—we cannot simply address every issue we know about with the same urgency, because there are inevitably some, and sometimes fundamental, trade-offs and antagonism in different policy priorities and implementation choices. However, such contextual thinking is typically done tacitly by individuals and organisations as they work towards agendas. This is probably because providing an explicit contextual rationale is challenging, has a substantial subjective component, and is therefore open to being contested. One interesting attempt to snapshot the global risk landscape is the World Economic Forums World Risk Report which, based on a risk perception survey (for the 2024 report 1490 'experts’ across academia, business, government, the international community and civil society, collected from Sept 4 to Oct 9, 2023), attempts to analyse global risks to support decision-makers in balancing current crises and longer-term priorities. The report is essentially an opinion poll about what risks participants believe will be the most impactful in 2024, over the next two years, and over the next 10 years. Perhaps The World Risk Reports greatest strength is that it considers a wide range of factors broadly categorised as economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological. A “Global risk is defined as the possibility of the occurrence of an event or condition which, if it occurs, would negatively impact a significant proportion of global GDP, population or natural resources”. Over the 19 years that these reports have been published environmental issues have quite dramatically risen up the risk rankings. When asked to select up to five risks that are most likely to present a material crisis on a global scale in 2024 'extreme weather events’ was the most common choice with 66% of participants including it in their top 5 risks. This is perhaps unsurprising given the catalogue of extreme weather-related events in 2023. When asked to estimate the likely impact (severity) of risks over a 2-year period ‘misinformation and disinformation’ rose to the top concern pushing, ‘extreme weather events’ into second place. The remainder of the top 10 were as follows: 3) societal polarization, 4) cyber insecurity, 5) interstate armed conflict, 6) lack of economic opportunity, 7) inflation, 8) involuntary migration, 9) economic downturn, and 10) pollution. Risk severity estimates over a 10-year period, were much more dominated by environmental risks which accounted for all of the top 4 risks; 1) extreme weather events, 2) critical change to earth systems, 3) biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, 4) natural resource shortages, as well as the 10th 'pollution’. the other top 10 risks over the next 10 years were; 5) misinformation and disinformation, 6) adverse outcomes of AI technologies, 7) involuntary migration, 8) cyber insecurity, and 9) societal polarization. Interestingly there were some disagreements about the urgency of environmental risks, in particular younger respondents tended to rank 'biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse’ and 'critical change to Earth systems’ far more highly over the two-year period compared to older respondents. In tackling environmental risks and their underlying drivers ‘misinformation and disinformation’ and ‘societal polarization’ will be important factors that determine how societies respond to, for example, climate policies and the extent to which scientific evidence is accepted as a reason for change. Like it or not the success or failure of many initiatives will be dependent on approval by increasingly divided and potentially misinformed publics. Tackling misinformation and disinformation without repressive policies and finding broad support for the policies needed will be a key challenge in addressing all of the other risks identified. Assessments like this, imperfect as they must be, are a useful tool in establishing how issues sit within a broader landscape. The 2024 World Risk Report firmly identified environmental risks as top priorities. So far, they are not being treated as such.