As per a recent WEF report, climate change will be the top global risk over the next decade
The World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) Global Risks Report 2020 shows that the top five global risks over the coming decade, with respect to likelihood, are all climate-related—extreme weather, climate action failure, natural disasters, biodiversity loss, and human-made environment disasters. In terms of potential impact, the top five risks are climate action failure, weapons of mass destruction, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, and water crises. A new McKinsey reports puts this in perspective with numbers—while the world will suffer losses worth trillions of dollars because of unmitigated climate change, in India, rising temperatures could shave as much as 4.5% from annual GDP. By 2050, nearly 30% of all daylight hours could become too hot to work.
When it comes to short-term risk outlook for 2020, economic confrontations and domestic political polarisation are the top two global risks, as per the WEF report. Young respondents in the WEF survey, however, listed climate change as the biggest risk for the world. Climate change has been an issue for more than a decade. The last five years were the warmest on record for the planet. The WEF report pegs the global economic stress from natural disasters in 2018 at $165 billion. It also talks of how climate activism has forced governments to make climate change a focus of their laws. However, piecemeal, standalone action won’t do. Countries must come together on this, but given how some of the worst polluters in the world, such as the US and Brazil, are brazening out the calls for them to act, global coordination on climate action seems too hard a goal to achieve.