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Fake news and climate change are biggest global risks, experts warn
Fake news is the biggest risk facing the world in the next two years, World Economic Forum risk experts estimate. Climate change is the biggest threat over the next decade. “What is potentially coming our way has never been more intense than now.”
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While 2023 was dominated by the rise of AI, the consequences of AI-generated misinformation and disinformation are the biggest threat facing the world in the next two years. In addition, one-third of risk experts expect an increased risk of global disasters in the next two years. In the next 10 years, two-thirds of experts expect it. These are the findings of the Global Risk Report released on January 10th. In addition, social polarization, economic uncertainty, and increasing geopolitical tensions score high on the lists.
Also striking is that the risks of climate change are increasing significantly, according to the annual report. For 2024, two-thirds of risk experts see extreme weather as a top risk, although climate change does not yet rank number one for the two-year forecast. But climate change dominates the next decade: extreme weather events, critical change to Earth’s systems, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and natural resource shortages occupy the top four risks.
How plausible are these risks, and what can we do about them? Folia spoke to Henk Volberda, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at the Amsterdam Business School, who collected the data for the Netherlands.
How reliable are the results of the report? Isn’t it extremely difficult to assess risks?
“Estimating risks is of course difficult, but the idea is that if you ask enough experts, an average emerges that is a plausible scenario. Worldwide, 1,400 experts were given lists of topics for which they had to rate the likelihood of such a risk occurring on a scale of 1 to 7. In the results, you can see great consistency in their ratings.”
What influence does age have on risk assessment?
“That certainly plays a role, and that role is well known. You see that especially the younger generation assesses climate change as the greatest risk as early as 2024. It is mainly the older generation and companies that see it more as a long-term problem. On average, climate scores high as a risk.”
What was your reading of the results?
“To be honest, they made me pessimistic. What is potentially coming our way has never been more intense than now.
No, it hasn’t. But isn’t it also something like the delusion of the year? In 2021, infectious diseases were still at the top of the list, and now they have disappeared from it completely.
“That’s a good point. The time period always has an influence. With the development of good vaccines, infectious diseases are not as high on the agenda now as they were during the corona years. This year we had to deal with the negative impacts of AI, misinformation, the unintentional spreading of misinformation, and deliberate disinformation. In the next two years, nearly three billion people will go to the polls in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What we saw in 2016 with the U.S. election, where fake news helped put Trump in power, we will now see in spades.”
What makes this report more forceful than ones from previous years?
“Some of the risks we currently have are still manageable, but all the problems are interlinked. For example, two-thirds of global experts expect a multipolar and fragmented world order to emerge in the next decade. You can already see increasing polarization of different power blocs, such as Iran joining Russia and China. Suppose Lebanon and Iran also get involved in the war between Israel and Hamas. The fear is that problems will start influencing each other and we will have to deal with interstate conflicts.”
“In addition, what I find worrying is that two-thirds of experts rank the risk of catastrophic disasters from climate change as the greatest risk worldwide in the next 10 years.”
Isn’t it typical that climate change is seen as an urgent problem 10 years from now, but not two years from now?
“If you ask me, that’s wishful thinking. If you want to do something about climate change to prevent warming in the range of 1.5 to 5 degrees, you have to do something about it now.”
Has any action been taken as a result of these reports in previous years?
“That’s hard to ascertain. Every year the Global Risk Report is discussed at the annual meeting of the World Economic Form (WEF), which will take place again next week in Davos. The WEF is a think tank that includes government leaders, NGOs, and businesses. Platforms are set up there for climate and environment, as well as AI. Of course, it has an effect, but whether that effect is big enough...”
“The WEF itself also has to deal with dis- and misinformation, and they are increasingly being targeted by extremist groups and conspiracy theories that see the WEF as the ‘ruler of the world.’ The inverted flags of the peasant protests here read ‘No Great Reset,’ referring to the WEF’s economic redevelopment plan in response to the corona pandemic. With the trend of far-right movements and conspiracy theories, we all have to deal with this.”
