In advance of its annual meeting in Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 2025 Global Risks Report. The report, based on the WEF’s Global Risk Perception Survey 2024-2025, identifies geopolitical risks as a top immediate concern for global risk officers and the broader risk community. Additionally, technological risks will become more problematic over the next two years, and environmental risks will be a predominant risk factor in the next 10 years. Here is our take on the highlights from the WEF report and what it means for risk leaders:

  • Geopolitical conflict and its impact on global trade is the top concern today. WEF’s report highlights that today’s current risk outlook is dominated by concerns about state-based armed conflict, responsible for causing havoc for global business and international trade. Since the invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago, companies have faced the harsh realities of geopolitical impact on business. Our own data also ranks geopolitical and social instability in the top five factors driving increased enterprise risk. Despite ceasefires, new administrations, and policy changes, this geopolitical conflict is still expected to remain a top three global risk by 2027. Risk leaders should strengthen their geopolitical risk intelligence and analysis to gauge the impact to the business.
  • Misinformation and disinformation tops the two-year outlook list — again. For the second year in a row, misinformation and disinformation occupies the number one slot on the medium-term outlook in the WEF Global Risks Report. Our own data (from Forrester’s Business Risk Survey, 2024, and The Top Systemic Risks, 2024 Forrester report) supports this and highlights risks surrounding data integrity, speed of innovation, and interconnectedness of global business systems — three of our top systemic risks for 2024. These risks accelerate and exacerbate the spread of misinformation and disinformation. As companies and governments ramp up investment in AI and AI’s capabilities continue to rapidly evolve, expect the exploitation and weaponization of information to become more widespread, easier to execute, and more difficult to detect.
  • Cyber events round out the top five but are likely underestimated. The WEF report identifies cyber espionage and warfare as number five on the near-term (two-year) outlook; however, Forrester data highlights concern among enterprise risk decision-makers globally about velocity of cyberattacks as the biggest driver of increased enterprise risk in 2024. Enterprise risk leaders should focus on how they are detecting misinformation about their organization and how they are set up to detect and react quickly to potential critical misinformation events.
  • Climate risk, a dominant long-term concern, is agnostic to politics or policy. The mood music about environmental sustainability and climate risk may have shifted globally, but risk management leaders remain steadfast that environmental risks will be a dominant force and top business concern in the next 10 years. In fact, four of the top five long-term risks are environmentally related. Risk leaders we speak to are quietly getting on with executing their plans to reduce their environmental impact, as they understand it not only reduces risk but, in many cases, contributes to cost reduction and better use of resources as well as being good for the planet.
  • Leaders are not paying enough attention to technology risks and tech resilience. Forrester data shows that enterprise risk leaders see cyberattacks and reliance technology as their biggest drivers of increased risk in 2024. However, one surprise from the WEF report this year is that technology risks are underrepresented in the current medium- and long-term outlook. Considering the scale of global technology outages in 2024, and the risk implications of generative AI and considerations for how to secure it, risk leaders should ensure that their technology risks are addressed and that their reporting on risk to senior leaders covers this important area to safeguard business investment in AI in particular in 2025.

Our upcoming report, “The State Of Enterprise Risk Management, 2025,” will dive further into the trends driving global enterprise risk in 2025 and will publish in the coming weeks. Forrester clients can book an inquiry or guidance session with any of us to discuss further.