These are the biggest threats we’re facing over the next decade.

We’ve made climate change a main focus of our work, but we also recognize that it’s part of a broader ecological crisis. On top of that we’re facing a host of threats in other domains; injustice, inequity, misinformation, polarization, censorship, surveillance, and armed conflict, just to name a few.

Each of these tugs on a thread somewhere else; ecological collapse ripples out through the economy, economic pressures ramp up societal polarization, and conflict undermines our ability to address global issues. In 2023, the term “polycrisis” entered the lexicon as a way to describe our modern predicament:

A polycrisis is a situation in which multiple, distinct crises occur simultaneously and interact in ways that amplify each other, producing outcomes more severe than the sum of the individual crises. The concept highlights the interdependencies and feedback loops between global systems, where shocks in one domain cascade into others.

Before we can address the polycrisis, we first have to make sense of this complex and disorienting threat landscape.

To make sure we’re presenting a balanced perspective, we’re drawing on one of the most comprehensive resources available: the Global Risks Perception Survey, or GRPS. Each year, the World Economic Forum conducts a survey of the global risk landscape, leveraging the expertise of over 1,500 leaders from government, academia, and the private sector, across every major region of the world.

We’ve gone through the reports from 2022 through 2026, and identified the 6 factors which consistently ranked the highest over that time period.