Editorial
A risky business
Identifying the most pressing societal issues and
prioritizing and coordinating action requires contextual
judgements about global politics and dynamics and
the risk and enabling landscape actors are operating
within. What is most important and deserving of
action now and into the future? Although the choices
are not a zero-sum game—action in one area doesn’t
automatically detract from action elsewhere—we cannot
simply address every issue we know about with the
same urgency, because there are inevitably some, and
sometimes fundamental, trade-offs and antagonism in
different policy priorities and implementation choices.
However, such contextual thinking is typically done
tacitly by individuals and organisations as they work
towards agendas. This is probably because providing
an explicit contextual rationale is challenging, has
a substantial subjective component, and is therefore
open to being contested.
One interesting attempt to snapshot the global risk
landscape is the World Economic Forums World Risk
Report which, based on a risk perception survey (for the
2024 report 1490 ‘experts’ across academia, business,
government, the international community and civil
society, collected from Sept 4 to Oct 9, 2023), attempts
to analyse global risks to support decision-makers in
balancing current crises and longer-term priorities.
The report is essentially an opinion poll about what
risks participants believe will be the most impactful in
2024, over the next two years, and over the next 10 years.
Perhaps The World Risk Reports greatest strength is that
it considers a wide range of factors broadly categorised
as economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and
technological. A “Global risk is defined as the possibility
of the occurrence of an event or condition which, if it
occurs, would negatively impact a significant proportion
of global GDP, population or natural resources”.
Over the 19 years that these reports have been
published environmental issues have quite dramatically
risen up the risk rankings. When asked to select up to
five risks that are most likely to present a material crisis
on a global scale in 2024 ‘extreme weather events’ was
the most common choice with 66% of participants
including it in their top 5 risks. This is perhaps
unsurprising given the catalogue of extreme weather-
related events in 2023.
www.thelancet.com/planetary-health Vol 8 February 2024
When asked to estimate the likely impact (severity) For the full 2024 report see
https://www.weforum.org/
of risks over a 2-year period ‘misinformation and publications/global-risks-
disinformation’ rose to the top concern pushing, ‘extreme report-2024/digest/
weather events’ into second place. The remainder of the
top 10 were as follows: 3) societal polarization, 4) cyber
insecurity, 5) interstate armed conflict, 6) lack of economic
opportunity, 7) inflation, 8) involuntary migration,
9) economic downturn, and 10) pollution.
Risk severity estimates over a 10-year period,
were much more dominated by environmental risks
which accounted for all of the top 4 risks; 1) extreme
weather events, 2) critical change to earth systems,
3) biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, 4) natural
resource shortages, as well as the 10th ‘pollution’.
the other top 10 risks over the next 10 years were;
5) misinformation and disinformation, 6) adverse
outcomes of AI technologies, 7) involuntary migration,
8) cyber insecurity, and 9) societal polarization.
Interestingly there were some disagreements about the
urgency of environmental risks, in particular younger
respondents tended to rank ‘biodiversity loss and
ecosystem collapse’ and ‘critical change to Earth systems’
far more highly over the two-year period compared to
older respondents.
In tackling environmental risks and their underlying
drivers ‘misinformation and disinformation’ and
‘societal polarization’ will be important factors that
determine how societies respond to, for example,
climate policies and the extent to which scientific
evidence is accepted as a reason for change. Like it
or not the success or failure of many initiatives will
be dependent on approval by increasingly divided
and potentially misinformed publics. Tackling mis­
information and disinformation without repressive
policies and finding broad support for the policies
needed will be a key challenge in addressing all of the
other risks identified.
Assessments like this, imperfect as they must
be, are a useful tool in establishing how issues sit
within a broader landscape. The 2024 World Risk
Report firmly identified environmental risks as top
priorities. So far, they are not being treated as such.
■ The Lancet Planetary Health
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open
Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
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