Global Risks 2010 Report Highlights the Interconnectedness of Risks and the Need for Long-Term Focus on Economic and Non-Economic Risks

Each year the Global Risks Network - a partnership that includes the World Economic Forum and MMC - identifies major global risks, assesses their economic impact, and recommends mitigation solutions. The findings of the Global Risks Network are captured annually in the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report, which includes a global risk landscape map, a risk interconnections map, and a risk barometer that details key trends and drivers associated with each risk.

This year's report focuses on the risks related to the recovery from the financial crisis and the implications of functioning in a new risk environment. With the report's perspective of a 10-year horizon, key risks highlighted in this year's report include the following:

• Fiscal crises and continued unemployment;
  
  
• Underinvestment in infrastructure; and
  
  
• Chronic diseases.
  
  

Global Risks 2010 stresses that the financial crisis continues as issues such as unemployment strain countries as they come out of the recession, and that non-economic risks must also be responded to even if they do not seem as imminent or as pressing as the fiscal crisis.

The report presents global risks against a backdrop of a higher level of systemic risk, global governance gaps, and potential impacts of "creeping risks" such as transnational crime and corruption and biodiversity loss, the impact of which may not be fully recognized. Highly interconnected risks, if not managed with a view to each risk's inter-connections, will have much further and deeper implications than most decision-makers realize.

The Global Risks Network urges policy makers to address and understand risks in the context of the wider economic system and to consider policies that encourage long-term infrastructure investments to foster resource efficiencies, particularly for energy and agriculture.

Register to download the Global Risks 2010 Report.