By Jahda Swanborough, lead, environmental initiatives, World Economic Forum and Aengus Collins, lead author, The Global Risks Report 2018, World Economic Forum
When identifying the biggest threats to humanity, governments and businesses traditionally focus on such risks as conflict and war, economic crises, and breaches of cybersecurity. However, the latest World Economic Forum Global Risks Report, published today, again highlights that the continued deterioration of the global environment is increasingly dominant.
The figure above summarises the results of our annual Global Risks Perception Survey, in which nearly 1,000 experts and decision-makers assess the impact and likelihood of 30 global risks over a 10-year horizon. All five environmental risks – the green diamonds – are in the “higher impact, higher likelihood” quadrant – continuing a marked trend away from economic and towards environmental ones that began in 2011.
Despite landmark policy achievements in recent years, our collective response to environmental risks remains inadequate. As more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries put it last November, “humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse”.
It is easy to numb ourselves to the scale, urgency, and messiness of this predicament. The terminology we use often makes the problems seem drier, less personal and more remote than they really are, and this can allow environmental concerns to slip down decision-makers’ priority lists.
But these are not slow-burn worries for which we have time to prepare. A few decades ago environmental issues may have been a longer-term concern: but in 2018 the long term is now. The last year, for example, is likely to have been within the three warmest on record and the hottest ever non-El Nino year. The Arctic had its lowest ever February sea ice levels and is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, potentially disturbing the predictability of the Gulf Stream and jet streams.
Nor are environmental risks abstract phenomena with little day-to-day impact. Evidence is accumulating alarmingly fast that they have an increasing toll on human health, wellbeing and prosperity.
People are ingesting pesticides through honey, consuming thousands of microplastic fibres a year in both seafood and freshwater, and breathing in carcinogenic air pollution in many of our cities. The widely-reported Lancet Commission found that soil, water, and air pollution causes 9 million premature deaths a year.
These trends are also hugely wasteful. The Lancet Commission concluded that pollution costs the global economy $4.6tn (£3.3tn) per year – roughly equivalent to the combined GDPs of the UK, Canada, and Argentina. And damage from extreme weather in 2017 is estimated to cost around $330bn.
We are not doing enough to address environmental risks. It is increasingly hard to argue that this stems from a lack of information or tools. We already know what needs to be done to address climate change, for example: we have most – if not all – of the physical tools needed, along with a plethora of studies and models to inform action. We are also poised to harness Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to tackle environmental issues. By leveraging artificial intelligence, advanced satellites and Earth observation technology, blockchain, quantum computing, DNA sequencing, and advanced robotics we may be able rapidly to scale-up truly transformative approaches.
What is holding the world back? The sheer scale and complexity of the challenge is one factor, political obstacles and resistance another. Psychologically, the need for profound environmental changes is only slowly developing from intellectual awareness to the personal conviction often needed to spur disruptive change.
Encouragingly, the level of conviction among government leaders (not just of nations, but of regions, states and cities) and the private sector, has significantly increased in recent years, particularly over climate change. This may not yet be unanimous, but momentum is building in the right direction.
Despite reasons for hope, the brutal reality is that our planet, and therefore our societies, are being pushed to the brink. Each year the situation continues to get worse. We must do more to build awareness and encourage the development of personal convictions over environmental change. But we also need to step back and remind ourselves just how intertwined environmental risks are with all the other global systems — including, notably, our economic models.
This edition of the Global Risks Report echoes the call in last year’s report for “fundamental changes to market capitalism”. It does so particularly in the context of building stronger solidarity within and between countries, but there are also strong arguments for making our economic principles and practice much more responsive to the imperative of protecting the environment before it is too late.
We must guard against separating economic and environmental risks into completely discrete categories, rather than seeing them as deeply interconnected parts of the same complex system. The programme notes for our Annual Meeting in Davos highlight that: “the global commons cannot protect or heal itself”. An increasing amount of the World Economic Forum’s work takes place at this intersection of the environmental and the economic. Interesting work is being done by such authors as Kate Raworth to build mental models that better capture the structural and normative connections between the environment and the economy. But much, much more needs to be done.
As the year begins, it is traditional to make resolutions for the 12 months ahead. Perhaps it would be hoping too much to try to overhaul how we think about, and act towards, the global environmental commons by the end of 2018. But let’s see what we can accomplish by 2020, when implementing the Paris agreement will begin and new global action agendas are due to be published for oceans, forests and biodiversity.
That gives us two years to try to grapple better with the complex interdependencies between economic, planetary and societal health. If we fail, the human cost of environmental risks will continue to rise and rise.