With Heightened Urgency, Water and Climate Hazards Again Top World Economic Forum Risks Report

Drought, water scarcity, climate change, extreme weather — these and other environmental factors are among the biggest risks to society and industry, according to the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report just published.

At Circle of Blue, we’ve been covering this story for years, and connecting the risks to on-the-ground realities, and have been watching “water crises” — note the intentional plural — inch upward in the report’s ranking.

Water crises, categorized as a collective societal risk because of their far-reaching consequences, also rated as highly likely and highly damaging. Water crises are a top-five most damaging risk for the eighth consecutive year, the report says.

“Global risks are intensifying but the collective will to tackle them appears to be lacking. Instead, divisions are hardening.”

“The results are quite consistent for the last few years,” Eugenie Molyneux, chief risk officer at Zurich Insurance Group, told my colleague, Brett Walton at Circle of Blue. “Environmental risks are near the top of the survey for their impact.”

The report contains several scenarios about “future shocks” — meaning rapid and destabilizing changes. One such scenario in the report, influenced by the crisis last year in Cape Town, is water shortages in major cities. Groundwater depletion, drought, population growth, poor management, and inadequate infrastructure development are all factors that could exacerbate and accelerate a “Day Zero” scenario for many cities’ water supplies, which we're tracking at Vector Center.

In 2018, our team was on the frontlines of this unfolding global challenge. We were in rural and urban India capturing the story and pictures about  how a nation of 1.3 billion people, by failing to protect its water, is courting disease and economic hardship as well as social upheaval.

In Michigan, we collaborated with Bridge and Detroit Public Television to ask what is in our drinking water? And what are the risks?

And the Global Risk Report’s recurring theme of groundwater risks and megacity stresses aligns with our analysis on how thirsty cities are increasingly turning groundwater to meet their needs, while at the same time experts suggest that global fresh groundwater sources are actually less than what is currently assumed.

Yet the most profound assertion in the report is this one: “Global risks are intensifying but the collective will to tackle them appears to be lacking. Instead, divisions are hardening.”

We face a moment in history when, somehow, we need to energize the collective will and heal the divisions as these global risks become profound realities.

Photographs, top to bottom: ? J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue (rice planting and paper mill), Brett Walton/Circle of Blue (groundwater monitoring stations in Michigan), Brian Lehmann for Circle of Blue (well drilling in the Ogallala Aquifer).