E3G

World Economic Forum: world is more vulnerable to global risks

By Marina Brutinel

Dealing with Risk Interdependencies

When it comes to seeking to regulate global risks, the report puts a particularly strong emphasis on:

The interdependencies between global risks, the importance of taking an integrated risk management approach to major global challenges and the necessity of attempting to deal with root causes of global risks rather than reacting to the consequences.“

Two innovative recommendations are put forward to meet these challenges:

Appointing Country Risk Officers. Inspired from existing risk managers in the private sector, they would endow governments with a hub for mitigating global risks across departments and to escape a silo-based approach.

Flexible ‘Coalitions of the willing’ of relevant governments and companies around specific risk issues. These would allow mitigation strategies to come about from dynamic interaction between business and governmental representatives, “allowing risk mitigation to be a process of gradually-expanding alliances rather than a proposition requiring permanent consensus.“

Greatest risk: Climate Change

Concerns about climate change have increased tremendously among political and business leaders. A poll of participants prior to the annual meeting of the WEF revealed that one in five, compared to less than one in ten a year ago, considered tackling climate change to be the biggest priority world leaders should concentrate on.

This was confirmed in a special brainstorm and discussion session of the WEF entitled ‘The Shifting Power Equation: Exploring the Implications’ where participants were asked to consider “which shift will have the most impact on the world in the coming years, and which shift is the global community least ready for?”.

The session summary reports that:

In a final vote, participants chose climate change (38%) and emerging markets (32.9%) as the issues that will have the greatest impact in the coming years, and climate change (55%) and inequality (12.2%) as two issues that the world is least ready for.”