The ineffectiveness of the climate change response was identified as the main threat for the next ten years by respondents to the Global Risk Perceptions Survey (GRPS) at the World Economic Forum (WEF). 77% of those surveyed believe that mitigation of the human impact on the climate has not yet begun or is at the very beginning of the journey. At the same time, the WEF warns: although there is no time to “think”, hasty “greening” can damage both the economy and nature at the same time.
On January 11, the WEF published the report “Global Risks-2022”, where it analyzed the complex of risks for the world’s population. Respondents to the GRPS survey consider the ineffectiveness of measures to combat climate change as the most serious threat in both the medium (2-5 years) and long-term (5-10 years) prospects. 77% of those surveyed said that global efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change have not yet begun or are at an early stage.
The WEF warns that the target of a temperature rise of 1.5 ° C by 2100, which was adopted by the Paris Agreement of 2016, will no longer work – according to new estimates, the increase will be 2.4 ° C (1.8 ° C in the most optimistic scenarios).
At the same time, the WEF notes that the hasty adoption of environmental policies can harm nature from the deployment of untested biotechnical and geoengineering technologies.
Hasty greening also threatens the security of national energy systems and leads to energy volatility. Countries that depend on carbon-intensive industries risk losing their competitive advantage in the future due to a carbon tax and similar trade restrictions.
The rise in global inequality has accelerated during the pandemic. In developing economies (excluding China), pre-pandemic estimates of GDP growth by 2024 have been reduced by 5.5 percentage points (p.p.). At the same time, in developed countries, economic growth will, on the contrary, be 0.9% higher than the old forecasts. In the poorest 52 countries (20% of the world population), only 6% of the population is vaccinated today – the WEF at least partially associates the expected dynamics of changes in GDP growth rates in different countries with losses from the pandemic. In addition, due to spending on the fight against COVID-19 around the world, the national debt has sharply increased – by 13 p.p., to 97% of GDP in 2020 alone (and growth will continue, including due to the strengthening of the dollar by 7 % since the beginning of 2021). This is expected to complicate the fight against the economic consequences of the pandemic and the financing of the energy transition.
The WEF also states that digitalization has led to a surge in cyberattacks. In 2020, the number of malware and ransomware attacks increased by 358% and 435%, respectively. At the same time, 3 billion people are left without access to the Internet, which widens the gap between them and the rest of the world (although, we note, and reliably protects almost half of the world’s population from cyberattacks).
Lockdowns and structural problems in certain sectors of the economy, especially tourism, coupled with increased protectionism, lead to imbalances in the labor market.
Thus, according to the WEF, the United States is faced with 11 million unfilled vacancies, while in the EU the figures are still an order of magnitude lower. Declining migrant employment can weaken the global flow of remittances and exacerbate the situation in countries where remittances account for a significant portion of GDP.
Even outside the planet, everything is not easy: the WEF warns that in the near-Earth space in the coming decades, the number of artificial earth satellites will increase dramatically (up to 70 thousand) (since 1957, only 11 thousand have been launched). The increase in this activity (in addition to the proliferation of space debris, problems for existing satellite infrastructure and increased costs for space monitoring of weather) may, as WEF expects, lead to unknown consequences for the environment. Will it be warming, cooling or something else – obviously frightened GRPS participants clearly do not know, but just in case they are afraid of this too.
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