Global Risks Report 2025: Some Highlights

The World Economic Forum (WEF) released the 2025 Global Risks Report (20th edition) ahead of its annual meeting in Davos in January 2025. The report, based on the WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) 2024–25, reveals an increasingly fractured global landscape, with rising geopolitical, environmental, societal, and technological challenges jeopardising stability and progress.

About the Report

The Global Risks Report is an annual publication, brought out by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with partners like Marsh McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group. The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the most significant risks facing the world, helping leaders and organisations understand and prepare for potential challenges and opportunities. It is a key resource for risk leaders, risk professionals, and anyone involved in risk management, as it offers insights into global risks as well as facilitates informed strategic decision-making.

This edition of the report showcases the results of the GRPS 2024–25, gathering insights from more than 900 experts across the globe between September 2, 2024 and October 18, 2024. In addition to the GRPS data on global risks, the report also uses insights from the WEF’s Executive Opinion Survey (EOS) on national risk perceptions, which gathered input from over 11,000 business leaders across 121 economies. This data highlights the risks considered most threatening to each country by 2027. When combined with the GRPS, it offers a clearer understanding of local concerns and priorities, revealing potential ‘hot spots’ and regional expressions of global risks.

The report examines global risks across three timeframes—the immediate term (2025), the short to medium term (up to 2027), and the long term (up to 2035)—to help decision-makers navigate both current crises and long-term priorities.

Some Key Findings of the Report

The report not only examines the survey findings and their various implications but also offers six detailed analyses of the selected risk themes.

(1) Declining Optimism The global situation is becoming more fragmented across various areas, including geopolitics, the environment, society, the economy, and technology. Over the past one year, conflicts have intensified; extreme weather events driven by climate change have become more frequent; and there have been growing societal and political divisions and continued technological progress that have been facilitating the spread of misinformation. Optimism is scarce, as the risk of errors in judgment or missteps by political and military leaders remain high. The world has been living in one of the most divided eras since the Cold War, and this fact is reflected in the findings of the GRPS, showing a grim outlook for the present, near future, and long term.

About 52 per cent of the respondents foresee an unstable global situation in the next two years (short term), a proportion consistent with the previous year. An additional 31 per cent predict turbulence and 5 per cent expect a particularly stormy outlook. When combined, these three categories show a four-percentage point increase from the previous year, suggesting a growing sense of pessimism about the world’s trajectory through 2027.

Looking ahead to the 10-year horizon, the outlook still seems grim, with 62 per cent of the respondents anticipating stormy or turbulent conditions. This long-term perspective has remained largely unchanged from the 2024 Survey, maintaining a similar negative tone. This reflects widespread scepticism among respondents about the ability of current societal systems and governing bodies to address and resolve the fragility created by the risks faced by the world at present.

(2) Deepening Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Tensions A comparison of the findings in 2025 with the two-year risk outlook from the GRPS two years ago reveals a significant shift in perceptions, particularly regarding conflict. ‘State-based armed conflict’, which is, at present, considered the top current risk by 23 per cent of the respondents, was not viewed as a major two-year risk in the previous survey.

In a world where armed conflicts have risen steadily over the past decade, national security concerns are increasingly shaping government priorities. The Geopolitical Recession section explores the risks of unilateralism gaining ground in national security strategies and emphasises the growing humanitarian consequences of ongoing conflicts.

The risk of further destabilising effects from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as ongoing tensions in the Middle East and Sudan, is likely to heighten respondents’ concerns beyond 2025 as well. In the two-year outlook, state-based armed conflict has risen from fifth to third place since the GRPS 2023–24.

The Supercharged Economic Tensions section of the report examines the potential developments in global geoeconomic conflicts. The rise of geoeconomic confrontation in the two-year outlook, moving from the 14th place in 2024 to the 9th place in 2025, reflects growing concerns about the future of global economic relations. Respondents are further worried about the role of technology in escalating geopolitical tensions, with cyber espionage and warfare now ranked fifth in the two-year, short- to medium-term outlook.

For the second consecutive year, misinformation and disinformation ranked as the top risk in 2027. The spread of false or misleading content is increasingly complicating the geopolitical landscape in various ways. It serves as a key tool for foreign entities to influence voter behaviour, creates uncertainty among the global public about events in conflict zones, and could be used to damage the reputation of products or services from other countries.

(3) Deepening Societal Fragmentation Societal fractures are a key element in the broader risk landscape. Inequality—whether in wealth or income—is seen as the central risk, significantly influencing and being influenced by other risks. It is eroding trust and wakening our collective sense of shared values.

In addition to inequality, other societal risks also appear in the top 10 of the two-year ranking, including societal polarisation, involuntary migration or displacement and the erosion of human rights and/or civic freedoms. The significance placed on these societal risks by respondents indicates that social stability is likely to remain fragile in the coming two years.

Concerns among respondents about certain key economic risks, such as economic downturn and inflation, have decreased since 2024. (These two risks experienced the largest drop in the two-year ranking.) However, the ongoing cost-of-living crisis since 2022 has contributed to inequality becoming the top interconnected risk in 2025. Economic downturn, inflation, and debt were identified by the GRPS respondents as key factors driving inequality.

While there are fewer societal risks in the top 10 of the 10-year risk ranking compared to the two-year, short- to medium-term ranking, the deep societal fractures highlighted in this report should not be seen as only short-term concerns. Over the next decade, inequality and societal polarisation remain among the top 10 risks. These risks are particularly important to monitor, as they are closely linked to social instability, which could trigger domestic political and geostrategic volatility. In super-ageing societies—such as Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Germany—adverse demographic trends could worsen these risks in the next 10 years. Pensions crises and labour shortages in the long-term care sector are expected to become significant and widespread issues, posing challenges for governments with no easy solutions.

(4) Environmental Risks: From Long-Term Worry to Immediate Crisis The impacts of environmental risks have intensified and become more frequent since the launch of the Global Risks Report in 2006. Furthermore, the outlook for environmental risks over the next decade is concerning, as all the listed 33 risks in the GRPS are expected to worsen in severity from the two-year to the 10-year horizon, with environmental risks showing the most significant decline.

Extreme weather events are expected to become an even greater concern, maintaining its position as the top-ranked risk in the 10-year outlook for the second consecutive year. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse is ranked second for the 10-year, long-term horizon, showing a notable deterioration compared to its ranking in the two-year, short- to medium-term outlook.

The GRPS highlights a generational divide in risk perceptions related to environmental issues, with younger respondents expressing more concern about these risks over the next decade compared to older age groups. For instance, pollution is ranked as the third most severe risk in 2035 by those under 30, the highest ranking of any age group surveyed.

As highlighted in the Global Risks Report 2024, there is a difference in how pollution is ranked by various stakeholders, with the public sector placing it among the top 10 risks in the 10-year outlook, while the private sector not doing so. The Pollution at a Crossroads section of the report seeks to bridge awareness gaps by examining overlooked pollutant risks that should be prioritised in policy agendas by 2035—and ideally much sooner, given their substantial effects on health and ecosystems.

(5) The Overlooked Threat of Technological Risks While the present year has seen significant experimentation with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools by companies and individuals, concerns about the adverse outcomes of AI technologies remain relatively low in the two-year risk ranking. However, complacency regarding the risks of such technologies should be avoided, considering the rapid advancements in AI and its growing presence. In fact, the risk of adverse AI outcomes shows one of the largest increases in the 10-year, long-term outlook compared to the two-year, short- to- medium term outlook. The report emphasises the role of Generative AI in generating false or misleading content at scale and its connection to societal polarisation. The Technology and Polarisation section of the report explores this issue in detail along with broader risks that are linked to increased connectivity, computing power growth, and more powerful AI tools.

The Biotech sector is one of the areas where technological advancements are the fastest. Advancements in biotech are making it easier for threat actors to manipulate or create new biological agents which, if released, could lead to pandemics or be used in targeted biological attacks. While biotech offers groundbreaking solutions for health issues, it also introduces new risks, ranging from potential clinical complications to unknown long-term effects. Without the establishment of comprehensive global ethical guidelines for biotech developments, there is a risk that ethical concerns would be ignored by some, leading to new sources of division and conflict within societies. The report provides an in-depth analysis of emerging risks in biotech, amplified by AI. Over a 10-year, long-term horizon, low-probability, high-impact risks exist, such as intrastate violence from biological terrorism and adverse outcomes from frontier technologies, including the accidental or malicious misuse of gene editing or brain-computer interface technologies. However, these risks do not overshadow the significant actual and potential benefits that biotech could bring to humanity.

(6) A Call to Action: Achieving Consensus in an Increasingly Divided World Deepening divisions and growing fragmentation are transforming international relations raising doubts about whether existing structures are capable of addressing the collective challenges the world has been facing. Global cooperation in areas such as geopolitics, humanitarian issues, economic relations and environmental, societal, and technological challenges may reach unprecedented lows in the near future. Key countries seem to be turning inwards, concentrating on their own domestic economic or societal issues, precisely when they should be strengthening multilateral partnerships to tackle shared global problems.

About 64 per cent of the GRPS respondents predict a multipolar or fragmented order, where middle and great powers contest, establish and enforce regional rules and norms, when asked about the global political outlook for the next decade. Responses to this question have remained largely unchanged compared to 2024. While the Western-led global order is expected to continue its decline over the next decade, it would still remain a significant centre of power. Meanwhile, alternative power centres are likely to grow stronger, driven not only by China but further by emerging powers such as India and the Gulf States.

Global Risks Ranked by Severity over the Short and Long Term

The report identified the following top five risks about India by the Executive Opinion Survey:

(i) Water supply shortage, (ii) Misinformation and disinformation, (iii) Erosion of human rights and/or civic freedoms, (iv) Pollution (air, water, and soil), and (v) Labour and/or talent shortage.

Conclusion

The next decade would be crucial as leaders face growing global risks. To avoid a worsening situation for citizens worldwide, the only solution would be to seek avenues for dialogue and collaboration because the global landscape is increasingly fractured. Moreover, the world is facing escalating geopolitical, environmental, societal, and technological challenges that threaten progress and stability.

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