The Age of (Proliferating) Risk
Global, local, and sectoral risk assessments are all pointing to a near future of worsening risks that interact and create new, more complicated threats. Risk reduction requires cooperation.
Over two decades of global risk assessment and reporting, by a wide range of institutions, environmental risks have steadily become more threatening and more concerning, even as they become more of an everyday pressure and a driver of other risks.
The 2023 State of the Climate report found, for instance, that:
“By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023).”
Major US financial regulators, including during Trump's first term, have found unchecked climate disruption could collapse the US financial system and the wider economy. Concerns are spreading that, without transformational action to reduce worsening economy-wide risks, proportional risk and cost will fall on everyone.
The 2025 Global Risks Report finds that even as climate and environmental risks worsen dramatically, many socieites are being overwhelmed by destabilizing pressures from inequality, a loss of trust in institutions, and tensions relating to geopolitics and economic stresses. The report also warns that optimism is declining. That means fewer people see a reasonable way through worsening challenges.
A major reason for this could be that misinformation and disinformation are seen as the top threat in the short-term (2-year) timeframe, while the top 4 global risks over the long-term (10-year) timeframe are environmental, and while inequality, polarization, and disinformation continue to be major risks.
Inequality is a worsening driver of risk, in diverse contexts, around the world, and a driver of other risks. Inequality-related risks are inherently multidimensional, because they affect not only those disadvantaged by economic inequality or imbalance of political influence; inequality-related risks also create hidden costs and drivers of destabilization and disruption.
Food security, famine, fiscal breakdown, destabilization, conflict, and mass migration on an unprecedented scale, are all increasing areas of risk linked to both environmental risks and the ripple effects of inequality. Political polarization and societal fragmentation—both drivers of the breakdown in trust—tend to consolidate harm from these other areas of risk.
Environmental risks are seen as much more grave priorities in the 10-year timeframe, likely because they worsen over time and do not hit everywhere at once. They are happening now, hitting all regions, and worse than expected, but they are not yet collapsing major national and international segments of the economy, at least not for everyone. This is not missed; people are aware that there is added risk in not acting soon enough to avoid the breakdown in overall environmental and climate resilience.
Other problems are both immediate and structural. Debt, for instance, and its impact on inequality, both between people in the same society and between nations. Debt is another word for finance, though the majority of those who need finance (from the wealthiest business leaders to municipalities and working families) prefer to think of finance as an infusion of new capital, rather than as a new burden of indebtedness.
The indebtedness resulting from that infusion of capital is necessary for the financial system to work as it used to working, but this is seen by increasing numbers of those affected as a flaw in the system. The question is what finance would look like if it were more widely available and yet never imposed unsustainable or debilitating debt burdens.
One proposal is to make significant adjustments in policy, incentives, data systems, and business strategies, to allow financial income to continue at current levels while margins on each financing instrument are reduced to more sustainable levels across a wider landscape of opportunity.
That future opportunities for reliable financial income are being depleted is another emerging risk. Waiting too long to move to this more decentralized, lower margin-per-instance model could mean major institutions never get the chance.
Polarization, division, radicalization, and the risk of armed conflict are all interconnected. Inequality and declining health and wellbeing are at the core of this web of interconnected risks. There is increasing concern that, in this atmosphere where so many people have lost trust in governing institutions, leaders may also be losing faith in each other's ability to stand by existing commitments. That raises the risk of armed conflict, even where pacts of non-aggression are in place.
Recent efforts by Russia to change its nuclear posture have also raised alarms. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its “Doomsday Clock” one second closer to midnight. The clock is now closer to midnight than ever before, at 89 seconds.
The Bulletin reports:
In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning. The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand.
They also cite climate change, biological threats, and disruptive technologies, as major risks increasing “the probability of global disaster”.
The major emerging question—in this age of proliferating and interacting risks—is how leaders, institutions, and whole societies, under the strain of multiple political vices and economic stresses, can set up the governance mechanisms to steer clear of catastrophe. Even as headlines suggest governance is collapsing, it is the tool we most need.
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