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“Catastrophic Outcomes”: Davos Elite Worried About Global Volatility, Cost-Of-Living Crisis
“Catastrophic Outcomes”: Davos Elite Worried About Global Volatility, Cost-Of-Living Crisis
What happens when plebs can’t afford bread, and the circuses aren’t that entertaining?
Nothing good. Which is why the cost-of-living crisis is the #1 problem, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report – an annual poll of 1,200 government, business and civil society professionals.
According to the poll, there will be little respite from “energy inflation, food and security crises” in the coming years (or months?).
In the near term, nearly 70% of those polled say volatile economies and various ‘shocks’ are in the cards, while 20% or so of those polled say they fear “catastrophic outcomes” within the next 10 years, according to Bloomberg.
“Very few leaders in today’s generation have been through these kind of traditional risks around food and energy, while at the same time battling what’s coming up in terms of debt, what’s coming up in terms of climate,” said Saadia Zahidi, WEF managing director, who warned that the world may be entering a “vicious cycle.”
“We’re going to need a sort of new type of leadership that is much more agile,” she told Bloomberg Television.
Next week will mark the annual WEF conference in Davos, Switzerland, where the global elite will sit around and discuss how best to run our lives.
The gathering begins at a time when inflation is at a four-decade-high across many advanced economies, with interest rates far more elevated than anyone was predicting 12 months ago.
The report calls for global cooperation, and warns that if governments mishandle the current crisis they “risk creating societal distress at an unprecedented level, as investments in health, education and economic development disappear, further eroding social cohesion.”
Increases in military expenditure could reduce support for vulnerable households, leaving some countries in a “perpetual state of crisis” and set back the urgent need to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. -Bloomberg
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Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment
Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment
The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report for 2019 indicates that most experts point to environmental problems as being the most serious threats to global stability—just as they found in the previous two years. That report follows on one in October 2018 by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It said with “high confidence” that at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions, “global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” Avoiding the worst-case consequences would require measures that have “no documented historic precedent.”
As Americans see the evidence of climate-influenced destruction, they’re on edge: Seventy-two percent of those polled late last year considered climate change “important,” a 15-percentage point increase over 2015. Sixty-nine percent were “worried” about it.
So here we are again, facing another round of bad news on the environment. Actually, the news is worse this time around. 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record; 2015-2017 are the other three. The Arctic experienced its second-warmest year ever. The head of the World Meteorological Organization said: “The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years. The degree of warming during the past four years has been exceptional, both on land and in the ocean.”
Rising sea levels, according to the IPCC, “will continue beyond 2100 even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C in the 21st century (high confidence). Marine ice sheet instability in Antarctica and/or irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet could result in multi-metre rise in sea level over hundreds to thousands of years.” Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice loss has recently received extensive media coverage as scientists have discovered just how far offtheir earlier predictions were. Antarctica’s enormous ice reserves are melting six times faster now than they were between 1979 and 1989.
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