Saadia Zahidi
Managing Director

The annual Global Risks Report offers a view of global risks at the start of each year, focusing global leaders on addressing emerging challenges and their potential knock-on effects. It does not offer predictions, nor does it suggest that the future is predetermined. Instead, it provides a range of potential futures with a view to prevention and management. Three years ago, the 18th edition of the Global Risks Report considered the possibility of a “polycrisis”, as risks from multiple domains unfold at the same time. This 21st edition of the Global Risks Report explores how a new competitive order is taking shape and its impact across multiple concurrent risk domains. We are witnessing the turmoil caused by kinetic wars, the deployment of economic weapons for strategic advantage, and growing fragmentation across societies. And as these “here and now” risks unfold, longer-term challenges, from technological acceleration to environmental decline, continue to create knockon effects across systems. In parallel, rules and institutions that have long underpinned stability are increasingly deadlocked or ineffective in managing this turbulence.

While this report examines the worst-case scenarios across domains, it is also clear that new forms of global cooperation are already unfolding even amid competition, and the global economy is demonstrating resilience in the face of uncertainty. This shifting landscape, where cooperation looks markedly different than it did yesterday, reflects a pragmatic reality: collaborative approaches remain essential to sustain economic growth, accelerate innovation responsibly, and build adaptive capacity for an increasingly complex era. This report examines a future where today’s relative resilience breaks down in the face of unprecedented turbulence, defined by the accelerating scale, interconnectedness and speed of global risks. Among contributors to the report’s survey and narrative, negative perceptions of the future are mounting. We find that 50% of leaders and experts surveyed anticipate either a turbulent or stormy outlook over the next two years, growing to 57% over the next 10 years with only 1% anticipating a calm outlook across each time horizon.

Geoeconomic confrontation has emerged as the most severe risk over the next two years while economic risks have experienced the sharpest rises among all risk categories over the twoyear timeframe, with concerns growing over an economic downturn, rising inflation and potential asset bubbles as countries face high debt burdens and volatile markets. Meanwhile, inequality is once again identified as the most interconnected global risk over the next decade, fuelling other global risks as the social contract between citizens and government falters under pressure. And as shorter-term concerns overtake shared longterm global objectives, environmental risks are being reprioritized downward in the two-year time horizon, with the majority declining in rank and exhibiting reduced severity scores, even as they remain key concerns in the ten-year time horizon. Finally, technological acceleration, while driving unprecedented opportunities, is also generating significant risks in the form of misinformation and disinformation, a top short-term concern, and creating anxiety about the potentially adverse longterm outcomes of AI, a risk that sees the sharpest increase in rank between the short term and the long term across all 33 risks covered.

The first section of this report shares these and other results from the latest annual Global Risks Perception Survey, which this year brought together the views of over 1,300 global leaders and experts across academia, business, government, international organizations and civil society. The second section of this report examines six key global themes in depth and considers how the risks associated with them may unfold in the coming years. These include relatively short- to medium-term risks associated with “multipolarity without multilateralism”, “values at war”, and an “economic reckoning” as well as medium- to long-term concerns associated with “infrastructure endangered”, “quantum leaps” and “AI at large”. As nations turn inward and strategic competition intensifies, we need a clear-eyed focus on understanding the dangers that lie ahead as well as maintaining or rebuilding capacity for collective action on these shared challenges.

We would like to thank over 160 experts, including from the Global Risks Report Advisory Board, the Chief Risk Officers Community, as well as Forum C-suite communities and staff from across its eleven thematic Centres, whose insights have shaped this report. We would also like to express our gratitude to the core team that developed the report - Mark Elsner and Grace Atkinson - and to Mitali Chatterjee, Ricky Li and Eoin Ó Cathasaigh for their support.

As the Global Risks Report enters its 21st year, one lesson endures: cooperation is indispensable for global risk management. In a world with greater competition, this may be harder to achieve, but only by rebuilding trust and new forms of collaborative mechanisms can leaders steer us towards greater resilience and help shape a more stable future. The future is not a single, fixed path but a range of possible trajectories, each dependent on the decisions we make today as a global community. The challenges highlighted in this report – spanning geopolitical shocks, rapid technological change, climate instability, societal strife, and economic risks – underscore both the scale of the potential perils we face and our shared responsibility to shape what comes next.