Risk Management Faces Dizzying Pace of Threats in 2026

Risks are emerging faster than many organizations can manage, leaving some feeling blindsided and unable to get ahead of new conditions.

Geopolitical shifts, rapidly accelerating security and health challenges, and fresh technology developments are coming at a rapid pace, placing new demands on risk management professionals, according to the International SOS Risk Outlook 2026.

Early risk detection would be a competitive advantage, said 80 percent of the 860 senior risk decision makers International SOS surveyed.

“The capacity to verify risk information at speed is rated as the most critical factor in responding to new risks by respondents, but only one in five (20 percent) believes they are capable of doing so,” the outlook said.

Almost two-thirds of respondents said security risk has increased in the past 12 months, and 43 percent said health risks have increased, with similar proportions expecting increases in 2026. Risks are also increasingly complex; 49 percent of respondents said the interconnectedness and convergence of risks have increased in the last 12 months.

Despite this, risk management teams have been coping with flat or reduced resources. Even though artificial intelligence (AI) tools have been touted as a potential solution to resource gaps, only 6 percent of respondents said AI was an important factor in helping them manage risk at the moment.

“The main internal resource that businesses depend on to face fast-developing threats is their people,” the outlook said. “But many employees report that their responsiveness and resilience have been worn down by successive challenges, including the pandemic and high inflation. They are also increasingly expressing underlying anxiety about the same global risks their employers must manage, including extreme weather events and discussions around nuclear incidents.”

The year 2025 saw a significant increase in armed conflict and violence worldwide, and this is likely to continue in 2026 amid persistent geopolitical tensions, the outlook said. Conflicts across the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia generate regular headlines, but smaller incursions and growing protest movements could have outsized impacts on organizational resilience. Plus, technology—including AI and deepfakes—serves as a risk amplifier, potentially undermining trust in state institutions and enabling extremist ideologies to thrive.

The window to react to incidents and protect workforces has narrowed, too. International SOS found that 74 percent of security and health specialists said the timescale for making critical risk decisions is tightening, but only 35 percent were confident they could mobilize teams quickly in a crisis.

“Against this background, organizations need to become more proficient at understanding, anticipating and addressing geopolitical risk,” the outlook said. “Given its fluid nature, it may require a combination of anticipatory and forecasting methodologies and robust detection and response capabilities to allow for effective mitigation. Organizations and teams with a flexible approach to integrating strategic and tactical intelligence in their decision-making are likely to be more resilient to such risks, and ultimately more successful at protecting people, assets, and business value in today’s geopolitically volatile world.”

Two-thirds of survey respondents said that uncertainty was an increasingly prominent feature of their risk landscape in the past 12 months. Rising barriers to trade, supply chains, and talent put many organizations’ strategic objectives in jeopardy.

“Strategic intelligence, at the end of the day, is about enabling these longer-range decisions,” says Michael Rogers, chief security analyst, West, for International SOS. “And part of those longer-range decisions is about the allocation of resources and task prioritization. Things of that nature are going to ultimately influence your ability to respond to multiple crises, multiple risks, at once. Without that, you’re left equitably distributing resources and you end up taking from activities that are not in a position to give—a sort of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ situation. When you have a strategic view and the (risk) indicators that you’re adequately monitoring, you are in a better place to make those decisions earlier on, and you’re making adjustments around the margins, rather than the wholesale.”

The speed of threats, overlapping nature of crises, and the challenging and uncertain information space will make risk management especially difficult 2026, Rogers says. While risk managers may be used to making decisions during crises once they achieve a certain threshold of verifiable information, the volume of data in the world and the speed at which it is generated makes verification at speed difficult—weakening confidence in decision making.

“If you’re not focused on strategic and forecasting intelligence, if you’re always playing catch-up, it’s probably downright impossible,” Rogers says. “What I’m seeing in conversations with (organizations) is a focus on building that forecasting intelligence capability.”

Organizations have successfully fine-tuned holistic crisis response frameworks that they can apply to a whole host of hazards, from armed conflicts to natural disasters, he explains. But they are still struggling with the development of strategic forecasting intelligence—the ability to see what’s around the corner, project how it could impact the organization, and building indicators to help risk managers monitor those conditions and take proactive action.

“We’re making decisions in uncertainty, and if you don’t already have some pre-established, strategic intelligence informing your decision-making up until that point, then you’re all the more blind,” Rogers adds.