Innovation feature: WEF Global Competitiveness Report

The coronavirus crisis should spur the world to “wake up to long-term risks” such as climate change, collapsing asset prices and weapons of mass destruction, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). Global leaders’ biggest concerns about the decade ahead are laid out in a new report by WEF, best known for organising an annual summit of leaders at the Davos ski resort in Switzerland. In 2006, the Global Risks Report sounded the alarm on pandemics and other health-related risks. That year, the report warned that a “lethal flu, its spread facilitated by global travel patterns and uncontained by insufficient warning mechanisms, would present an acute threat.” Impacts would include “severe impairment of travel, tourism and other service industries, as well as manufacturing and retail supply chains” while “global trade, investor risk appetites and consumption demand” could see longer-term harms. A year later, the report presented a pandemic scenario that illustrated, among other effects, the amplifying role of “infodemics” in exacerbating the core risk…14 years later that became a reality…
With the world more attuned to risk, what is the opportunity now in the wake of the pandemic? Michael Avery speaks to Emilio Granado Francos, the WEF’s lead author in Bern, Switzerland.