Collapsing asset prices, indebtedness and fiscal crises have featured prominently in each of the Reports since 2006. This year, editor and lead author Sheana Tambourgi points to what she calls an 'awareness gap' about the implications of underinvestment in infrastructure, rising costs of chronic disease and, more cryptically, a deficit in global governance.
Why the attention towards such apparently vague risks?
The panel discussion focused on the impact of interconnections between individual global risks. A central theme of the Global Risks Report, the complex interconnections between risks are examined graphically in the Risks Interconnection Map (RIM, pictured).
For example, the Map shows how connections between the degraded state of global infrastructure, weak climate/energy policies and China's slowing growth rate can explain why chronic disease, food price volatility and biodiversity loss could combine to produce a disproportionately large economic cost.
What can such an analysis offer? To answer this question I am reminded of a recent piece in Nature suggesting that “science should focus more on understanding the present and less on predicting the future”. A focus on the apparently vague and relatively modest hazards of the here and now may help to avoid a calamity of far greater proportions.
