Understanding the Major Global Risks with the WEF Global Risk Report 2021

The WEF just published the Global Risk Report 2021. In its 16th edition, the report addresses the significant global risks like war, natural disasters, infectious diseases, and several other events and hazards that could jeopardize companies and governments' operations. In this episode, Ricardo highlights the report's main finds and goes back to 2020 to see how the landscape changed with the COVID-19 pandemia.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Ricardo (4s):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes podcast. Today I'd like to talk about the global risk report, release it by the word economic forum. Recently, every year they produced this usually at the time of novels this year, of course, that was not happening in Davos, but it's happening in Singapore, but they released this something like a forecast of what may happen in 2021, and this is not something new. And they do that for, I would say, around 15, 16 years. And I'm tracking the global risk report for quite a while. I would say maybe six, seven years that I tried to read and try to catch up. And you may ask me why I'm interested in a global risk report.

Ricardo (47s):
It's because I want to understand this macro trends, this macro trends that could indirectly harm the work I'm doing. And this is why it's so important because I have no control of COVID-19. I have no control of stagnation or increasing that by countries, but I know how to react to that. So this is why I want to understand a little bit more. So what I did, so I took the global risk report of 2021. And if you don't want to read the 90 pages, you don't, but go at the very beginning, you will see a two by two matrix with the main risks plotted on this.

Ricardo (1m 28s):
And they're trying to understand the perception of that. And if you go and does a very traditional low probability, high probability, low impact high impact, and basically they have something like 11 or 12 risks that are place it in the high rank, that high severity rank means high probability and high impact for them, social power, two of them economic five of them, environmental and one technological, and the attack is more related to cyber security. Even more now that people are working more and more online and technology Spain, the key role, five of them environmental, and of course, climate change biodiversity heating of the earth and several others related to the environment, two of them, economic stagnation, and that enforced sociopathic where COVID and infectious diseases is related to that.

Ricardo (2m 21s):
So erosion of society like this conflict that we're facing laughed against, right? You know, this kind of turmoil that we are living in several countries, livelihood a crisis. So people are getting poor up to a point that people are struggling to survive. So this is all the social media. And do you know what I did? I went online and I took the global risk report of 2020 and that put on the side and say, okay, let's see what happened in 365 days. And I had the chance to be in Davos during the time of the world economic forum and everybody was talking. And these was one of the top in 2020, the environmental, everybody was talking about climate change.

Ricardo (3m 4s):
We saw, you know, last year, the discussion with Gretta and Dez about the climate change and how things will B. But at that time, if you go to infectious disease, the probably towards low, it was not even on the stop quadrant. And now it's not only on the top quadrant, but it's on the very top. So in one year, and then I did a third exercise, I went to 2010 and I went to the same chart. And then imagine what was on the very top. It was top acid collapsed. If you remember 2009, we had a massive crisis with the subprime where most of the assets of people, they just shrink dramatically.

Ricardo (3m 48s):
And these was the top risk at the time. And pandemic was in the middle was not even in the top quadrant. Why I want to tell you that is that a, every single analysis, even if you hired the most competent academics or researchers, they are a reflect of the current moment. This is why, when something so disruptive, like COVID happens. It just takes everybody unprepared. Even one year ago at Davos, people were a little bit concerned about China, but nobody was deeply concerned about the pandemic becoming what it became right now.

Ricardo (4m 31s):
It's on the top of that, but maybe next year we may have us super cyber attack that shut down the country or shut down the planet. We really don't know. And what is my final message to that is that even if you put your best effort, trying to have your crystal ball and try to forecast, it's just impossible for you to predict this big, massive disruptive changes. So maybe tomorrow there is a hurricane that destroys half of the planet. We don't know that. So what these, our ability, our ability is to be able to identify triggers to that and react faster.

Ricardo (5m 16s):
So when I read these global risk report, I tried to position my mind, my business, the projects I'm managing vis-a-vis bat. And I try to create scenarios to understand, am I strong enough to that or not? And if not, what can I do to new this resilience? This is exactly what these, the new risk management, the new risk manager is not just putting 300 lines on your risk register and just monitor that because, you know, if you want to identify all possible risk, it's not 300 is not 300,000 is not 300 million. You know, it's an infinity, it's an unlimited number.

Ricardo (5m 56s):
So think always about that in the, how you were able to react, who react fast, who adapt fast and who see the triggers faster, wins the game. And these, this is exactly what I'm trying. So take a look on that. It's free, it's online, you just download and it's a very good content for you to become more educate on what are the global risks that could impact your life in your projects. I hope you enjoy this podcast and shoot next week with another five minutes podcast.

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