Look out for these what-if scenarios - WEF's 10 potential future shocks
Source: Asia Insurance Review | Mar 2018
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The growing complexity and interconnectedness of our global systems can lead to feedback loops, threshold effects and cascading disruptions. Sudden and dramatic breakdowns – future shocks – become more likely, according to the Global Risks Report 2018 published by the World Economic Forum.
It presented 10 short “what-if” scenarios, not as predictions but as food for thought to encourage world leaders to assess the potential future shocks that might rapidly and radically disrupt their worlds:
- Grim reaping: Simultaneous breadbasket failures threaten sufficiency of global food supply
- A tangled web: Artificial intelligence “weeds” proliferate, choking performance of the internet
- The death of trade: Trade wars cascade and multilateral institutions are too weak to respond
- Democracy buckles: New waves of populism threaten social order in one or more mature democracies
- Precision extinction: AI-piloted drone ships take illegal fishing to new – and even more unsustainable – levels
- Into the abyss: Another financial crisis overwhelms policy responses and triggers period of chaos
- Inequality ingested: Bioengineering and cognition-enhancing drugs entrench gulf between haves and have-nots
- War without rules: State-on-state conflict escalates unpredictably in the absence of agreed cyberwarfare rules
- Identity geopolitics: Amid geopolitical flux, national identity becomes a growing source of tension around contested borders
- Walled off: Cyberattacks, protectionism and regulatory divergence leads to balkanization of the internet
The report, issued annually in January, and sharing the perspectives of some 1,000 global experts and decision-makers on the key risks facing the world who were surveyed, also highlighted that environmental and cyber threats will have a major impact on businesses this year.
The Global Risks Report 2018 was developed with support from the WEF’s Global Risks Advisory Board and ongoing partnerships with Marsh, Zurich and academic advisers at the University of Oxford, the National University of Singapore and the University of Pennsylvania. A