A new report urges policy makers to prioritise action on inequality, pollution and environmental degradation, misinformation and disinformation, and declining levels of global collaboration and social cohesion.
Melissa Sweet reports:
Key risks facing the world – including conflict, extreme weather events, pollution and environmental degradation, the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, rapid technological developments, and inequality – are set to undermine health and wellbeing.
The World Economic Forum’s latest global risks assessment, released this week, makes bleak reading, and has many important findings for those concerned with health, whether globally or within countries, and the provision of healthcare and aged care.
The 20th edition of the WEF’s annual Global Risks report stresses the importance of building multilateral collaboration and institutions, warning of wide-ranging consequences from global fragmentation, including the undermining of global regulatory efforts and the green transition.
Weakening multilateralism will also leave the world less well prepared for the next global pandemic, and means urgent public health and broader humanitarian issues will slip down the global agenda even more, with declining global budgets for humanitarian aid, and widespread suffering if United Nations institutions and the humanitarian sector are weakened further.
“These findings strongly suggest that it is critical for public, private and civil society stakeholders across all countries to work together to reinforce existing multilateral institutions wherever feasible,” the report says.
It stresses the importance of diversifying supply chains and promoting population health in order to reduce demand for the health and aged care workforce, which in countries like Australia will face ever-increasing labour shortages.
The report – based on data collected before the United States election and before the latest news on the escalating toxicity of digital platforms – underscores the critical importance of tackling misinformation and disinformation.
Digital dangers
The report calls for efforts to build digital literacy, and comprehensive public awareness campaigns to educate citizens about the risks associated with digital spaces.
However, it stops short of making recommendations, as put forward this week by United States public policy expert Professor Robert Reich, to tackle the corporate and political power of Big Tech.
To “tame the oligarchy”, Reich suggested busting up X, Amazon, Meta and other giant tech media platforms, or treating them as public utilities, responsible to the public.
Reich also called for a ban on hugely wealthy individuals being allowed to own critical media, and taxation of large accumulations of individual wealth.
Indeed, the word ‘oligarchy’ is notably absent from the WEF report, in contrast to its prominence in outgoing US President Joe Biden’s farewell address, which highlighted the risks of “a tech industrial complex”, including to democracy and climate action.
Biden said that “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power”. The WEF report identifies misinformation and disinformation as the top risks facing the world in the next two years, and says its accelerating spread is exacerbating other global risks, including geopolitical instability, armed conflict and extreme weather events.
“The amount of false or misleading content to which societies are exposed continues to rise, as does the difficulty that citizens, companies and governments face in distinguishing it from true information,” it says. “The upshot is that it is becoming increasingly hard to know where to turn for true information.”
The report puts a big focus on concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic bias, and warns that algorithms, especially complex machine learning models, can be an entry point for cyberattacks that use disinformation.
An example would be a structured query language injection attack, in which inputs are manipulated to generate incorrect outcomes or to compromise training data sets.
“As many models lack transparency, either by intention, by accident, or because of intrinsic opacity, it is difficult to identify vulnerabilities and mitigate potential threats. In addition, given the reliance of algorithms on third-party data sources, software libraries and network infrastructures, threat actors can compromise the supply chain to manipulate algorithms and cause widespread damage.”
Deeper digitalisation can make surveillance easier for governments, companies and threat actors, especially as societies polarise further, the report warns.
Expert perspectives
The report draws upon multiple data sources, including the Global Risks Perception Survey of 900 experts across academia, business, government, international organisations and civil society, collected between September and October 2024.
The WEF’s Executive Opinion Survey, involving more than 11,000 business leaders in 121 economies, and contributions from more than 150 other experts between April and November 2024, also inform the analysis.
The report examines global risks through three timeframes – current or immediate term (in 2025), short to medium-term (to 2027), and risks emerging in the long term, to 2035 – and by stakeholder groups, and demographics.
Divided times
At the start of 2025, the global outlook is not optimistic, and is increasingly fractured across geopolitical, environmental, societal, economic and technological domains, according to the report.
“Over the last year we have witnessed the expansion and escalation of conflicts, a multitude of extreme weather events amplified by climate change, widespread societal and political polarisation, and continued technological advancements accelerating the spread of false or misleading information,” it says.
The report says we seem to be living in one of the most divided times since the Cold War, and this is reflected in the results of the Global Risks Perception Survey, which reveal a bleak outlook across all three time horizons – current, short-term and long-term.
State-based armed conflict, now ranked as the top current risk by 23 percent of respondents was not even mentioned as a leading two-year risk two years ago.
The weakness of the multilateral security framework with the UN Security Council is “alarming”, says the report, and is likely to lead to increased military spending.
World military expenditure increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2023, reaching a total of $2.4 trillion, 11 with 2023 seeing a steep rise over 2022. The top five countries accounted for 61 percent of the total.
Meanwhile, UN peacekeeping operations are in decline on aggregate, with their size having been reduced from over 100,000 peacekeepers in 2016 to around 68,000 in 2024. The report says national security considerations are starting to dominate government agendas, and contrasts increasing military expenditure and declining humanitarian aid.
Interconnections
Societal fractures are central to the overall risks landscape, as shown in the diagram below.
Inequality in wealth and income is perceived as the most central risk of all, and has a significant role in both triggering and being influenced by other risks.
It is contributing to weakening trust and diminishing our collective sense of shared values, the report says.
Environmental risks
The impacts of environmental risks have worsened in intensity and frequency since the Global Risks Report launched in 2006, and the outlook for environmental risks over the next decade is “alarming”.
While all 33 risks examined in the WEF survey are expected to worsen in severity, environmental risks present the most significant deterioration.
Extreme weather events are anticipated to become even more of a concern than they already are, with this risk being top ranked in the 10-year risk list for the second year running. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse ranks second highest over the 10-year horizon.
Unsustainable patterns of production and consumption are driving increasing pollution of air, water and land, and the report highlights health impacts of air pollution, pharmaceutical pollution, black carbon or soot, methane, Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals” microplastics
In 2024, six of the nine “planetary boundaries” for environmental health were crossed, with a seventh boundary in jeopardy. These boundaries contribute to the stability of the world’s life-support system, including our economies and societies.
The report calls for improved monitoring, reporting and evaluation systems and “more holistic and pre-emptive” regulation of pollution.
Rapid developments in biotechnology are also identified as a significant risk requiring more effective global regulation. “The pace of change in the sector is so fast that regulators globally struggle to keep up,” says the report.
“Rising geopolitical tensions suggest that the political will for a comprehensive cross-border agreement on acceptable uses of biotech is unlikely to be present for some time, posing an ongoing challenge. But ultimately, intergovernmental agreements will be required to keep biotech risks under control.
“If one or more countries deviate from ethical and technical protocols, there is every chance that malicious or accidental developments in biotech will quickly become a problem for other countries, as well.”
• See Croakey’s report of last year’s analysis: New reports identify big-picture challenges for health – locally, nationally and globally
See Croakey’s archive of articles on global health