About the paper
The Global Risks Report 2025 is the World Economic Forum’s 20th annual assessment of major global risks across geopolitical, environmental, societal, economic and technological domains.
It is a mixed-methods report based primarily on the 2024–2025 Global Risks Perception Survey of over 900 experts worldwide, collected from 2 September to 18 October 2024, supplemented by the Executive Opinion Survey of over 11,000 business leaders in 121 economies and qualitative input from 96 experts.
The geographic scope is global.
Length: 104 pages
More information / download:
https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/
Core Insights
1. What is the report’s central argument about the global risk landscape in 2025?
The report argues that the world is entering 2025 in a state of deepening fragmentation, with risks increasingly reinforcing one another across domains. Its central diagnosis is that geopolitical conflict, societal polarization, environmental stress and technological disruption are converging in ways that existing governance systems are poorly equipped to manage.
The immediate risk that dominates the 2025 outlook is state-based armed conflict, selected by 23% of GRPS respondents as the risk most likely to present a material global crisis in 2025. This is a major shift from the previous year, when it ranked eighth. The report connects this rise to the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, and to broader fears that conflicts could escalate or spread.
But the report does not present conflict as an isolated geopolitical problem. It describes a risk environment where conflict is linked to geo-economic confrontation, cyber warfare, misinformation and disinformation, forced displacement, humanitarian crises and weakening multilateralism. In other words, the world is not only experiencing more crises; it is losing some of the connective tissue needed to manage them collectively.
The tone is notably pessimistic. Only a small share of respondents see the near-term outlook as stable or calm, while a majority expect an “unsettled” world and sizeable minorities expect turbulence or stormy conditions. The report’s broader message is that short-term crisis management is no longer enough because many immediate risks are symptoms of deeper structural shifts.
2. Which risks dominate the short-term outlook to 2027, and why?
The top risk over the two-year horizon is misinformation and disinformation, which ranks first for the second year running. The report sees this as especially dangerous because false or misleading content now interacts with political polarization, conflict, elections, distrust in institutions and advances in generative AI.
The short-term top risks also include extreme weather events, societal polarization, cyber espionage and warfare, state-based armed conflict, inequality, involuntary migration or displacement, erosion of human rights and civic freedoms, geo-economic confrontation and pollution.
Several patterns stand out. First, geopolitical risks have moved sharply upward. State-based armed conflict is now third over the two-year horizon, and geo-economic confrontation has risen from fourteenth to ninth. Second, economic risks such as inflation and economic downturn have fallen out of the two-year top 10, even though the report warns against complacency. Third, societal risks remain highly prominent, suggesting that social cohesion is becoming a central risk variable rather than merely a consequence of other crises.
The report’s short-term outlook is therefore not just a list of threats; it is a picture of a world where trust is weakening. Misinformation undermines shared reality, polarization reduces the capacity for collective action, and geopolitical rivalry makes international cooperation harder just when it is most needed.
3. How does the report describe the longer-term risk outlook to 2035?
The 2035 outlook is even darker than the short-term outlook. The report finds that all 33 risks assessed in the GRPS are expected to increase in severity over the 10-year horizon compared with the two-year horizon. Environmental and technological risks become much more prominent over the longer term.
The highest-ranked long-term risk is extreme weather events, followed by critical change to Earth systems, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, natural resource shortages and misinformation and disinformation. This means that four of the top five long-term risks are environmental.
The report presents environmental risk as having moved from a distant long-term concern to an urgent, worsening reality. Extreme weather remains the top 10-year risk for the second year in a row, while biodiversity loss and Earth system change are framed as signs that the world may be approaching irreversible thresholds.
Technological risks also rise sharply over the decade. Adverse outcomes of AI technologies ranks only low in the two-year outlook but climbs to sixth in the 10-year ranking. The report treats this as a warning against complacency: current risk perception may be underestimating how quickly AI, biotechnology and other frontier technologies could reshape social, political and security risks.
The 2035 message is that the world faces a compounding risk landscape: climate stress, technological acceleration, demographic change and geostrategic fragmentation are not separate trends, but structural forces that interact.
4. What role do technology, misinformation and polarization play in the report’s risk narrative?
Technology is treated as both an accelerator and an amplifier of risk. The report does not argue that technology itself is the root cause of fragmentation, but it shows how digital platforms, generative AI, algorithmic systems and expanding surveillance capabilities can intensify existing social and political divisions.
The most immediate concern is misinformation and disinformation. The report notes that generative AI makes it easier to produce false or misleading text, images, audio and video at scale. This makes it harder for citizens, companies and governments to distinguish reliable information from manipulated content.
The report links this directly to societal polarization, which ranks fourth over the two-year horizon. Polarized societies are more vulnerable to manipulated narratives, and manipulated narratives can in turn deepen polarization. The risk is a feedback loop in which trust in media, institutions and public information continues to erode.
The report also highlights algorithmic bias and censorship and surveillance. As public services, media systems and political communication become more data-driven, biased or opaque algorithms can produce unfair outcomes and further reduce trust. Meanwhile, the growing digital footprint of citizens gives governments, companies and threat actors greater capacity to monitor and influence behaviour.
The report’s underlying assumption is that technological governance is lagging behind technological capability. It calls for stronger accountability, transparency, digital literacy and upskilling for those building and using automated systems.
5. What does the report imply for global governance and risk preparedness?
The report’s strongest implication is that fragmented governance is becoming a risk multiplier. Across conflict, trade, technology, pollution, biotech and demographic ageing, the report repeatedly returns to the same problem: many of the most severe risks require collective action, but the international environment is becoming less cooperative.
For armed conflict, the report argues that weakened faith in multilateral institutions could push governments towards unilateral action and selective alliances. For geo-economic confrontation, it warns that escalating tariffs, sanctions and investment restrictions could fragment global trade and weaken cooperation on climate, health, technology and development. For pollution and biotech, it stresses the need for better regulation, monitoring and global norms.
The report does not suggest that global treaties alone are sufficient. It also emphasizes regional organizations, multi-stakeholder engagement, domestic resilience, public education, corporate strategies, research and development, and better monitoring systems. But its broader conclusion is that durable risk mitigation depends on rebuilding forms of cooperation that can survive geopolitical rivalry.
The final message is cautiously normative: the world is moving into a more divided and unstable period, but the report insists there is no viable alternative to dialogue, collaboration and multilateral solutions. Its purpose is therefore not simply to forecast risk, but to push leaders to act before today’s warning signals become irreversible crises.