Threatwatch: The greatest risks to world stability

Threatwatch is your early warning system for global dangers, from nuclear peril to deadly viral outbreaks. Debora MacKenzie highlights the threats to civilisation ? and suggests solutions

This week, some 3000 people, including the world's top corporate and political movers and shakers, are gathering in the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the 43rd annual World Economic Forum (WEF). They will be told that of all the threats the world faces, the most likely one to hit us is the growing income gap between the poor majority and the rich few ? namely, themselves.

They will also hear that we need to address this and other deeply interconnected risks such as financial collapse, greenhouse gases, food and water shortages, bigger and ageing populations, spiking food and oil prices and extreme weather. Welcome to the world's most glittering exercise in global threatwatching.

Although Davos will host nearly 50 heads of government, most delegates are corporate bosses, paying upwards ? some well upwards ? of $20,000 a head to be there. Participants admit that they don't shell out to "improve the state of the world", the WEF's official aim. Davos is an unrivalled chance to network, do business ? and party. Rock star Bono, a regular, dubbed it "fat cats in the snow".

Ranks of experts

Yet the packed schedule of daytime discussions features top names from science, including Daniel Kahneman, Tim Hunt and Eric Kandel, and technology, including Tim Berners-Lee. And as a basis for discussion, everyone gets a detailed assessment of the problems facing the globalised world. In this year's Global Risk Report, "over 1000 experts from industry, government, academia and civil society" rank 50 risks according to how likely they are to strike in the next 10 years, and their potential impact.

Many risks highlighted this year are familiar to New Scientist readers: bacteria resistant to antibiotics, economic and environmental stress, cybersecurity, weapons proliferation, failure to adapt to climate change.

When the experts pooled their views, the growing global wealth gap won "most likely", followed by rising greenhouse gases and ageing populations. Systemic financial failure won "greatest impact", followed by food shortage and weapons of mass destruction. Water shortages and government budget imbalances made the top five in both categories.

The team of risk experts also plans that by next summer, they will have worked out each country's "resilience", or adaptability, to combined threats. A preliminary effort in the current report finds that rich countries, perhaps unsurprisingly, are more resilient than poor ones.

Snapshot of risk

This is not a scientific attempt to quantify risks, but a snapshot of what people think the risks are, says Axel Lehmann, chief risk officer for the Zurich Insurance Group, one organiser of the study. "It isn't a forecast," he says, "more a platform for discussion" among groups who rarely discuss risk with each other. Airing such issues at Davos can lead to action; in 2002, it helped globalise the battle against disease.

But the report may be giving too much weight to opinion surveys, especially as the fragility of modern, rich societies is not widely appreciated. "Perceptions really don't get you that far in understanding 'real' risks," says Victor Galaz of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. "Really big shocks tend to be surprises." Meanwhile, it is hard to come by data that can accurately quantify resilience.

Problem of perception

On the other hand, he says, the WEF report should raise awareness of interconnected risks. Lehmann agrees. Perceptions are what people act on, he says ? and these perceived risks are from a peer group business leaders might trust. Yet perceptions might derive more from headlines than reality: the Arab Spring may have boosted concern about the destabilising potential of wealth disparities.

Moreover, there is a deep contradiction between interconnected risks and the whole idea of Davos. Traditionally, companies and governments are hierarchical. In such systems, leaders can get their heads around individual problems and address them.

Once things get too complex and interconnected, says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a boss cannot do that, and hierarchies don't work. They must give way to decentralised networks of control.

Creators of woe

So if the interconnected, globalised world is too complex to be managed hierarchically, the global bosses gathered in Davos to consider all these risks may be unable to do much about them. That's despite the fact that many of the gathered glitterati helped create the wealth disparities, greenhouse gases, unstable financial networks and other bugbears they are being warned about.

Even if a network is what is needed to control things, Davos's pre-eminence in networking isn't necessarily enough. The question, notes Bar-Yam, is whether the Davos elite constitute the network the world's problems need.

But if nothing else, so many wealthy people should have an obvious solution to inequality: giving their own money away. Yet that, warns Lehmann, does not work as well as investing in technologies that enable the poor to prosper.

Still, the fat cats of Davos control many purse strings. If the Global Risk Report serves as a reminder that loosening them to mitigate global risks might constitute enlightened self-interest, it can hardly hurt.

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