Global Risk Report & The Doomsday Clock - The World Is Projected to Get Even Riskier Over the Next Decade

 It is a good idea to keep an eye on the health of the world on an annual basis.  It might even be possible to do something about the risks identified.  

The world economic forum (WEF) asks >1000 experts for their views and has been publishing the Global Risk Reports (GRR) annually since 2006. GRR is a thoughtful document assessing where the world is now and, where it is heading over the next 10 years.  It tries to identify impacts of different risks on global welfare. 

GRR is an extensive document over 100 pages long - in this article, my aim is to provide a summary of the report's findings - how is the world today and what to expect at the end of the next 10 years. 

The Doomsday Clock (DDC) is monitored by the Science and Security Board (SSB) of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS).  Founded in 1945, DDC was set up to assess the danger posed by nuclear weapons.  Currently, SSB includes globally recognised experts in climate change, nuclear risks & disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).  Midnight on the clock represents a catastrophe when humans would have rendered the world uninhabitable.  The DDC on 27th January 2026 was set at 23:58:35, merely 85 seconds to midnight - closest it has ever been to catastrophe. 

The doomsday clock, like a countdown, is intended to reflect the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age along with new existential threats of climate change, bioterrorism and AI. Its setting changes mostly with the perceived threat of nuclear war (at least until recently, threats from other causes were not considered catastrophic). 

I shall discuss DDC first and then analyse GRR that I consider of greater relevance to the human civilisation. 

Doomsday Clock (DDC):  With all the uncertainties about the future direction of nuclear wars in late 1940s, DDC  made total sense.  Hydrogen bombs, much more powerful than the 1945 fission bombs used in Japan, were getting introduced to the nuclear arsenal and the geopolitical tensions were high.  DDC settings fluctuated (see slide) over the years mainly reflecting the  possibility of a nuclear conflict - although the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) makes nuclear war less likely, even though the consequences of a nuclear war will ensure the end of human civilisation as we know it.

In the slide, the vertical axes represent the time - the left axis shows minutes from midnight while the right hand axis shows the actual clock reading.

Slide 1

IMHO, various treaties to limit the size of the nuclear arsenal etc. are academic - there are enough bombs to destroy the world many times over.  There is aways a risk that nuclear war is started unintentionally with some  misunderstanding or even through a technical fault.  

A more worrying development is the emergence of a political class of self-centred leaders who are not guided by any ideology but by an intense desire to dominate the world and leave a personal legacy behind.  The geo-political tensions that such behaviours create increase the risk of conflicts and this is what the DDC is also highlighting in 2026. 

It appears to me that in the medium term of a few decades, threats posed by climate change, bioterrorism and AI will become as potent as the threat of nuclear holocaust. The new risk of climate change and AI will be like the genie set free and humans will be helpless to control the damage that it can cause - all the sign are that we are not paying attention just now.  Unlike nuclear conflicts, risks from climate change and advanced AI are outside human control and over the long run they would pose a much more serious threat to the survival of human civilisation. 

This might be a good time to renormalise the setting on the doomsday clock to accommodate the new risks.  A renormalisation of DDC will also help to  move away from a permanent state of extreme threat that raises the possibility of people just ignoring the warning.

The Global Risk Report (GRR):  For the 2026 GRR, more than 1300 global leaders and experts were consulted for their views.  The world is a complex place with abundance of data (both reliable and fake) - navigating your way in the mountain of information is not an easy ask.  Bonafede experts offer our best hope to understand what is happening around us  - and opinions of a good number of such experts must carry reasonable credibility in identifying relevant risk factors. 

The world is also changing rapidly and to project the current situations to ten years in future may be a fool's errand. However, long-term forecasting helps identify trends such as technological disruption or climate change, and allows one to develop mitigation strategies to minimise damage.  At least that is the hope - personal biases, misinformation, vested interests etc. can cause uncertainty, paralysis and poor planning.  Climate change is a case in point where even though science and empirical information have been calling out for action, not enough is being done to address the risks.  In fact, expert opinion in GRR projects that 5 of the 10 top risks in 10 years will be environmental risks. 

Summary of GRR Findings: The five main risk categories (see Slide 2) had subcategories - 33 in total which the experts ranked in terms of the level of risk they present (now and in ten years time).  I have presented the top 10 risks in the slides below and refer you to the full report for more details.  

 Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 4

Slide 5

Discussion:  Comparing slides 2 and 3, one notices that environmental, societal and technological risks dominate the 10-year outlook - in sharp contrast to the current outlook dominated by geopolitical concerns.  This is understandable with ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza and other places, and these are concerning for global risk.  But then some level of hostility is always present and it is reasonable to expect that this situation of localised wars will continue at one place or the other over the next 10-year (of course, one excludes the threat of nuclear war as mutually assured destruction idea largely precludes it).  What is different in the 10 years horizon is the rapidly escalating threat of environmental risks as well as the uncertainty about the development of advanced AI.  Societies are also getting more and more fragmented. 

Slide 5 summarises the situation very well - the experts clearly feel that the world will be a much riskier place in 10 years time with environmental degradation (slide 4) becoming by far the greatest threat.

One hopes that leaders of the world will pay attention to this important report and start to work in a co-operative way to control (and reverse) the damage to the environmental that is happening.

I feel pessimistic about things changing much over the next decade - for the simple reason that the two fundamental problems of global population size (still increasing albeit more slowly) and the global growth model of gross domestic product (GDP) are elephants in the room that nobody wants to talk about.  The world is being driven to go past many tipping points which, once crossed, make it very very difficult to neutralize.  Also, now the time to act may be just getting too late - results take time and we do not have this luxury any more.

Interesting times ahead ...

Thanks for reading.