Extreme weather events among global risks of highest concern for world stability in the next 10 years: Global Risks 2014
Seven hundred experts have contributed to the draft of Global Risks 2014, the survey of global risks carried out by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The ninth edition of the report has been launched at the 44th meeting of the World Economic Forum. It considers a core set of 31 global risks in five categories: economic, environmental, geopolitical, technological, and societal . With respect to the first editions it comes to light a growing attention to environmental risks. Among global risks of highest concern for world stability in the next decade, we can find water crisis and a greater incidence of extreme weather events (floods, storms, fires... ), as well as income disparity, unemployment/underemployment, climate change and cyberattacks. The fiscal crisis proves to be the global risk with the biggest impact on systems and countries over the next ten years. Global Risks 2014 highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments.