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Risk Report: Concern that World Leaders Are Unprepared for Political, Economic, and Societal Challenges

Amidst deepening geopolitical tensions, rising geoeconomic confrontation, and a growing sense of societal fragmentation, experts are not optimistic that political and military actors will respond appropriately to the risks before them.

“The ensuing risks are becoming more complex and urgent, and accentuating a paradigm shift in the world order characterized by greater instability, polarizing narratives, eroding trust, and insecurity,” wrote World Economic Forum (WEF) Managing Director Saadia Zahidi in the forward to the WEF’s Global Risks Report 2025.  “Moreover, this is occurring against a background where today’s governance frameworks seem ill-equipped for addressing both known and emergent risks or countering the fragility that those risks generate.”

The report was released this past week to coincide with the WEF event in Davos, Switzerland, where politicians, academics, and business leaders met to discuss the global threat landscape and how the world is responding.

More than 900 experts were surveyed for the WEF report, which does not paint a rosy picture of how prepared those in power around the globe are to meet the challenges of the moment. The report’s authors found that “deepening divisions and increasing fragmentation” are calling into question institutional structures to confront challenges across the board.

“Levels of global cooperation across many areas of geopolitics and humanitarian issues; economic relations; and environmental, societal, and technological challenges may reach new lows in the coming years,” the report explained. “Key countries appear to be turning inward, focusing on mounting domestic economic or societal concerns, just when they should be seeking to strengthen multilateral ties to confront shared challenges.”

Currently, the top-ranked risks most likely to present a material crisis on a global scale are:

  1. State-based armed conflict

  2. Extreme weather events

  3. Geoeconomic confrontation

  4. Misinformation and disinformation

  5. Societal polarization

 

State-based armed conflict moved up the list of immediate risks from 2024, rising from eighth overall to number one in 2025. The report’s authors credited this to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Sudan, as well as the Middle East, where the Gaza ceasefire agreement started after the report’s publication.

While not ranked in the top five specific risks, the report’s authors found that inequality—which includes wealth and income—was considered the most central and interconnected risk of all those discussed in their research, in part because it could trigger and influence other risks.

“The importance ascribed to this set of societal risks suggests that social stability will be fragile over the next two years, weakening trust and diminishing our collective sense of shared values,” according to the report. “This is being felt not only within societies but also between societies and governments: the perceived risk of censorship and surveillance (ranked 16) is up five places compared to last year.”

Speaking at a panel in Davos on the report’s findings, Vice President of Nigeria Kashim Shettima said that “multilateralism is key” to addressing instability and conflict in Africa.

“We need to come up with bold solutions for the challenges facing us,” Shettima said. “We should have a holistic approach to counter the mayhem of Boko Harem and others…to address the real cause—extreme poverty.”

But the WEF report also identified a “waning appetite for multilateralism,” due in part to the United Nation’s Security Council’s (UNSC’s) inability to keep conflicts from escalating. The UN’s peacekeeping operations have also seen a decline, dropping from more than 100,000 peacekeepers in 2016 to just 68,000 in 2024 when multiple conflicts were ongoing.

“There is a danger that more governments lose faith not only in the UNSC, but in multilateralism as a forum for resolving conflicts, and that the world instead becomes more adversarial, with conflicts ending only via battlefield, winner-takes-all victories, and not through negotiated, multistakeholder peace agreements,” according to the report. “While there continue to be discussions that aim towards reform of the UNSC, they are unlikely to make meaningful progress over the next two years given the complexity of aligning national interests and the current lack of political will to do so.”

This mentality was on display on Thursday when newly sworn-in U.S. President Donald Trump delivered prepared remarks at Davos as well on Thursday, explaining the approach his administration plans to take to move forward on his America-first agenda.

“My message to every business in the world is a very simple one: Come make your product in America, and we will give you among the lowest taxes of any nation on Earth,” Trump said. “But if you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then, very simply, you will have to pay a tariff—differing amounts, but a tariff—which will direct hundreds of billions of dollars and even trillions of dollars into our Treasury to strengthen our economy and pay down debt.”

Looking to the global stage, Trump has already moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accord. He also pledged in his speech at Davos to pressure European allies to contribute more financially to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a demand similar to ones he made during his first administration.

The WEF report’s authors warned that as governments around the world move toward unilateralism, national security considerations could have more wide-reaching repercussions for societies.

“Increased state surveillance of citizens and restrictions on individual freedoms may become more commonplace in the name of national security,” the report said. “Perceived or actual threats from other countries also provide an opening for governments to seize control of narratives and suppress information, perhaps blurring the lines between genuine security considerations and political expedience.”

These concerns were reflected in what experts ranked as the top-level risks for the short term—by 2027:

  1. Misinformation and disinformation

  2. Extreme weather events

  3. State-based armed conflict

  4. Societal polarization

  5. Cyber espionage and warfare

 

The report’s authors highlighted that as the average citizen’s digital footprint grows alongside the world’s computing power, and as society becomes more polarized, the vulnerability of citizens’ online activities could undermine their trust in information and institutions.

“The amount of false or misleading content to which societies are exposed to continues to rise, as does the difficulty that citizens, companies, and governments face in distinguishing it from true information,” according to the report.

In the panel at Davos, Gillian R. Tett, provost, King’s College, University of Cambridge, said that people feel a profound grievance towards those they perceive to be elites, and that two-thirds of people now expect businesses, governments, and the media to “deliberately lie to them.”

Tett was citing figures from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, which was released on Monday and found that six in 10 respondents reported moderate to high senses of grievance due partly to confusion over where to turn for credible information.

In the WEF report, the authors explained that it is easier than ever to create and spread information—including misinformation and disinformation—than ever before given the rise of artificial intelligence tools and social media.

Respondents who identified concerns about misinformation and disinformation also “highlight social polarization as one of the most severe risks in the same timeframe,” according to the report. “Poor quality content and lack of trust in information sources continue to present a threat to societies.”

Across the immediate-, short-, and long-term outlook, respondents to the WEF report consistently ranked environmental risks in their top concerns.

The WEF report reflected that view with its global risks outlook for 2035—dubbed “the point of no return” where respondents overwhelmingly ranked climate-related risks in the top five:

  1. Extreme weather events

  2. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse

  3. Critical change to Earth systems

  4. Natural resource shortages

  5. Misinformation and disinformation

The WEF report’s authors noted that extreme weather events are a “persistent concern year-on-year—the risk was also ranked number two last year—the uptick in pollution (ranked number 6) demonstrates that environmental risks that are often perceived as long-term threats are starting to be perceived with more certainty by respondents as short-term realities, as their effects become more apparent.”

Twenty-three percent of respondents expressed “maximal concern” when ranking pollution risks, likely due to the world surpassing six of the nine “planetary boundaries for environmental health” in 2024, the report explained.

“These boundaries contribute to the stability of the world’s life-support system, including our economies and societies,” the report added. “Unsustainable patterns of production and consumption are driving climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, referred to by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as the Triple Planetary Crisis.”

In the panel, Tett said that a silver lining of extreme weather disasters that the world is experiencing now—such as in California, Ireland, and Scotland— is that it is waking people up to climate change.

“It is forcing us all, even—or especially elites at Davos—to recognize that we have a world of inequality and unless we create a more inclusive approach, these challenges are only going to get worse,” Tett said.

To see how global risks have evolved over the last few years, revisit our coverage of the Global Risks Report 2024 and the Global Risks Report 2023.

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