 Welcome to this launch of Global Risks 2015. My name is Adrian Monk. I'm head of engagement at the World Economic Forum. Joining me here on the platform, my colleagues, Marloretta Geniek, Espen Bart Eider, from Zürich Insurance, Axel Lehmann, and from Marsha MacLennan, John Drizik. We're hearing from all of them about this report, which hopefully you will have in electronic or hard copy. But before we do, I'm going to play a brief video just outlining some of the key findings of the report. So, roll tape, as they used to say. Technology has created a hyper-connected society, but the way we perceive the world remains fragmented. How can we protect ourselves from the biggest global risks that we face? For this year's Global Risks report, more than 800 international experts were asked to assess the major threats affecting mankind stability. 28 global risks are assessed, spread across five categories, economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological. This year's report analyzes the individual potential of each risk, as well as its interconnections. Major water crises, failure of climate change adaptation, cyber risks, unemployment, and underemployment have all been flagged as high-level threats due to their likelihood and potential impact. However, the greatest concern is clearly the flare-up of interstate conflicts, a realisation resurfacing 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While we're able to break down physical barriers between nations, we're still haunted by tensions and mistrust. Creating trust is the challenge, but it's also the solution. And while the right discussions can help us understand the world around us, we must take concrete action to mitigate environmental risks and avoid further economic shocks. How can we do that? In its 10th edition, the Global Risks report now makes a critical distinction between risks and trends. Risks are on certain predictions. Trends are the current patterns that will either amplify or prevent them. Through their interplay, we can create a blueprint for action. Join the conversation to help address global challenges. The headline on that report is that lady had an extremely reassuring voice. Just to turn to, hopefully, another reassuring voice. Margaret, can you take us through some of the headline points that are identified in this year's report and what's different about this report? Sure. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I'm going to take you through some of the background about the report, how we came to the findings, what the methodology is, and also through the key findings of today's report. First of all, it's the first round birthday of the Global Risks report. We're celebrating, as we heard in the video, the 10th edition this time, and it's an edition that looks back at some changes to the methodology. We introduced the concept of trends in the methodology reviewed in a major way, the list of risks as well. So this has been a tremendous effort over the past months and over the past years since we launched the last risk report already. And we went out alone in this effort. We were accompanied by our strategic partners, Mark MacLennan and Zurich Insurance Group, and also academic advisers, National University of Singapore, Oxford Martin School, and the Wharton Risk Centre. One important novelty of this report is that we were working with a high-level, multi-stakeholder advisory board who are experts on the different areas of risks and also on the topic of risks, as such. And they were of tremendous help to revising this methodology. So it is not just an effort that the team or the World Economic Forum has been producing by itself, but there are great inputs from the outside, from people from different walks of life, private sector, public sector, international organisations, academia, and the like. And the outcome is, as in previous years, we have maintained the same structure as in previous years for the report. We will start, and this is what's going to shape today's press conference as well, we're going to start with an overview of the findings of the surveys of what the key risks for this year, for the next ten years are that we're putting out this year. And then we also have three deep dives that we felt were highlighting important intersections between the different risks. So one is on the interplay between geopolitics and economics. There's one on urbanisation and developing countries and how this interacts with risks. And there is one about how the risks and rewards of emerging technologies can be balanced going forward. And another new part that we have introduced is that we, which we will try to do more systematically in the future, is to look at practices, how to address risks that provide some ideas of the possible solutions. In terms of, just very briefly, what is a risk at all? How do we view a risk? So for us, a risk is actually an uncertain event or a condition that can cause significant negative impact for several countries or industries within the next ten years. So we're looking at a ten-year-time horizon. It's important to keep this in mind when we look at the data. It is also globally in nature because several countries and industries are affected. And then on the contrary, trends are very often the drivers of those risks. So one example of a trend would be aging populations, which then drives again fiscal pressures on countries or health-related risks as well. So trends are different in nature. They're certainly ongoing and they are drivers of risks. And as in previous years, and if you may be aware of this, the core of this report, so the findings that we produce every year are based on a perception survey of global leaders, of decision makers. The survey has been administered by the World Economic Forum. It's essentially the forum communities. We had about 900 participants this year from different types of organisations, so from business, academia, different levels of expertise, male, female. It's work in progress, but we're getting there. We're improving slightly every year. And we also are fairly good in terms of regional representation with about 40% from developing countries. And different age groups are represented as well, so we have a certain amount of the younger population below 30, which enables us also to compare across the different groups of respondents. And now to the results of this year's global risk perception survey and to the key risks that we highlight in the global risk report. We look overall at a set of 28 risks from different categories, so these are economic, environmental, geopolitical and societal and technological risks. This year what we see, and we assess them in terms of likelihood and impact, this year what we see the most likely risk is indeed interstate conflict. So we're thinking about the 10-year time horizon, so over the next 10 years decision makers think that interstate conflict is a very realistic possibility. And in terms of the most impactful risk, we look at water crisis. So water crisis are considered the most impactful risk this year. Overall, we saw a major rise in terms of geopolitical risk in comparison to last year. So all the entire category of geopolitical has been terrorist attacks, failure of the failed states, a state collapse, a state crisis, but also failure of national governance, all those risks have really moved up significantly in terms of impact and likelihood as well, with terrorist attacks being one of the most, the one that moves up the most in this category across both dimensions. We also see a rise in environmental risk this year. So environmental risks are being perceived as more important than in previous years. This obviously puts important pressure on the talks that are going to take place towards the end of the year in Paris to find appropriate solutions as well. And then the other aspect that we look at is the interconnections between those risks. The internet connections are important because none of those risks can be obviously seen in isolation. And we see that realizing and keeping in mind those interconnections is really key to the discussion how to prepare for those risks, how to mitigate those risks as well and how to prevent them. And when we look at the interconnection maps this year, we see one particular interesting aspect that's been probably boiling up over the past years and we see that respondents think that there's one hotspot in a way which is right in the middle, it's the profound social instability which is the most interconnected risk this year. And it is most interconnected with economic topics such as income inequality for example, unemployment, but also at the same time with interstate conflict. So there's a relation to both ways between social instability and interstate conflict, fail-off national governance as well and also migration flows. So there are many pressures that fragileized societies and this is one of the findings of the report today. So with this, the key findings essentially of this year's report are that interstate conflict is once again after a long time at the key risk in terms of both likelihood and impact. It really comes out very, very clearly this year alongside other geopolitical risks that we have identified. Then social stability is under threat from different types of risk, economic, environmental, technological and geopolitical as well. So there are reasons to worry that social stability is going to be more fragileized over the next ten years. And actually all those risks including the social stability are further undermining trust between countries as well and fueling geopolitical risks at the same time. What can we do about mitigating those risks? Obviously those risks are all dynamic that cross different areas of expertise. They cannot be influenced by one single actor alone. So a lot of collaboration is needed in order to address those risks. Collaboration between the public and the private sector on the one hand, but also international collaboration at the same time. We are very aware of the need for this type of collaboration but we have seen many barriers in terms of putting it into place. So this year 2015 has actually provided a number of opportunities through international conferences and through a number of business initiatives as well as climate change to advance in this type of collaboration and we hope to see more of solutions to the risk space going forward. With this I'll stop here, maybe just one note. This is just a peak of the iceberg. There's a lot of information actually more than we can put in the presentation here available on the website. You see a little bit of it in the little booklets that we were distributing in the back of the room. But there's an interactive data tool also online that allows you to access the data directly and to have further insight into the data from the risk group. Thank you. Margaret, thanks very much. Of the top five global risks in terms of likelihood, three of them are geopolitical risks. Espin, can I just ask you to explore in a little more depth those risks and some of the background to them? Exactly. Thank you, Adrian. I think it's one of the major takeaways from the 2015 report as Margaret had just told us is that geopolitical risk is now very high on the agenda and the number one perceived risk in terms of likelihood and actually number four in terms of impact is what we call interstate conflict with regional consequences, interstate between states. Now, this is actually quite remarkable in a long-term perspective because you may remember that 25 years ago, as was said in the presentation, as the Cold War receded and the perception of a globalizing world, a real globalization took hold, we were perfectly aware that the world was still dangerous and that there were wars and conflict and mass murder and massacres in many places. But from an economic perspective it happened in what you could maybe slightly cynically say in the margins of the core economy. So there was a kind of expanding cosmos of cooperating states where a number of the states that used to be political adversaries of the west became part of the same economic system and then China joining the World Trade Organization as one of many examples and then outside in the periphery there were continued conflicts more about state failure, state collapse, non-state actors, including the rise of terrorist networks. So people in the military and security area were shifting the focus from what we used to think about as symmetrical conflict to asymmetrical conflict. So the doxa or what everybody believed to be true for the last 20 years is that wars do not any longer happen between states but in states and particularly in failing states. So we stopped fearing other states that worked and started fearing states that didn't work any longer referenced to the collapse of Yugoslavia as one example in the 1990s and many other examples. The challenge now as we are identifying through our networks is that people are again recognizing what we can call the return of strategic competition between key players. We do not break up peripheral issues but it means that major economies are now in conflict with each other not as in the world war but in a direct shooting conflict including the one maybe most characteristic of this that's happening in Ukraine but which is in reality a major power game between Russia and Europe and the US. In East Asia it's not the violent conflict but there are deep tensions, deep distrust between the second and the third largest economy in the world, China and Japan just to take an example. And we have a Middle East which is basically not only in the normal state of affairs but where the state system that was introduced 100 years ago at the end of the first world war seems to be collapsing and here the rise of the Islamic state with regional and global consequences as we recently have seen. Now what that means is that we will have a simultaneous challenge in the security area of symmetrical and asymmetrical tension at the same time. So we will both have elements of what we thought about as relics of the Cold War coming back, not in the old form but in a new form and we will have the continuation of more asymmetrical challenges like the rise of non-state violent actors. What we are further more pointing out is that this is closely related to the economy. At first glance you could get the impression which would be wrong that economic risks are down and societal and geopolitical are up as if the economy doesn't matter. That's perfectly wrong because actually it's just as Margarita said is the interconnectedness between all this. In one sense the globalization movement from the early 90s could be seen as politics taking the lid off and allowing the economy to flow free in the world. So investors from western investors thought it was perfectly natural to invest for instance in Russia and vice versa and global interconnectedness was seen as a good thing and it was a good thing because it drove global growth. Now we are seeing that politics is coming back in the form of sanctions, in the form of the use of economic tools as part of strategic competition maybe as political warnings against investments in certain countries maybe trade wars, a return to protectionism which again is linked not only to the geopolitical level but also to the societal level of increasing distrust between societies and increased demand to retract from integration which we see in Europe but also in Asia. We have a major, this year a major program going on in ASEAN trying to build an ASEAN economic community but we also see some of the counterforces that we Europeans recognize saying we don't really want to give up the privileges that comes with national protection. So all of these risks are significantly connected. We're also seeing a rise of regionalism that may threaten to substitute global institutions. This is a question mark because if well managed the strengthening of regional trade arrangements for instance could be a good thing because it could be building blocks to major breakthroughs on the global level but if it's a substitute it means that we will go from actually a genuinely globalizing economy into a more regionalizing economy and we predict that that will have inverse effects on the ability to continue with the sound global growth and of course for countries that are heavily dependent on global economic trade or participation in global value change this may be a change that can lead to significant challenges. All this again of course related to heavy fluctuations in energy prices and so on. One possible consequence of this is that global governance institutions will be weakened because of the lack of trust between governments and the lack of trust between governments and those governments which again can undermine the will to invest in global integration and regional integration global institutions and a follow-on effect from that will be that we will be less able as human beings on the planet to deal with collective problems like global health environment and so on. If the key players are primarily focused on their relationship to each other their competition with each other there is less energy left to deal with what the people on this planet should be dealing with these days namely to address common challenges. So this is just a few highlights of a rich chapter and some rich data, but the takeaway message is that interstate conflict with regional consequences is for the first time since we started the risk report now on top and that's actually a significant development I believe reflecting on the geopolitical and new survivalist that we just had in 2014 but probably also when Omen now things that might come. Thank you Adrian. Esbyn, thanks very much. Axel, can I just turn to you to look at some of the risks identified in the report in greater depth, particularly things like urbanisation and maybe a look back at some of the trends that have been picked out in the past ten years. Sure Adrian, good morning everybody. Let me talk a little bit about urbanisation. We have an unprecedented transition from a rural society to a really truly urbanised society that has a lot of benefits on one hand but unplanned to rapid urbanisation can ultimately really touch upon basically every risk that Margareta was really eluding to. Just think about it in 1950, only one-third of the world population was living in cities. Today it's roughly 50% and in 2025, so in ten years for here two-thirds more than 60% of the world population will live in cities. We will see rapid growth in particular in Africa. Estimates are saying that roughly 56% of the African population will live in cities in the year 2050 up from roughly 40% today and in particular also rapid growth in the Asia region going up close to 70% of the Asian population who will supposedly live in cities up to the year 2050 from less than 50% today. 80% of the world GWP is and will be produced in cities on one hand. On the other hand we also know and that's a tragedy, roughly 40% of the people are living in urban slums. So there are a lot of benefits but an unplanned and too rapid urbanisation will really touch basically all of the risk dimensions particular infrastructure, health, climate and societal issues and let me just give a couple of highlights. When I look to infrastructure we have huge investment, huge investment needs, the OECD is estimating that just for telecom and just for water more than 71 trillion of investments are needed up to the year 2030, so that is in 15 years. In Africa alone until the year 2020 every year more than 90 billion US dollars of investments are needed only half of it roughly 45 million is funded. So here I think could be a perfect case for a public-private collaboration. On the health obviously with huge concentration of human being diseases can flourish. We already know that roughly close to a billion, more than 700 million of people lack adequate sanitation today. I said in my opening 40% of the people are living in slums and we should not only think about communicable illnesses like we have seen in the past, SARS, H1N1, warm diseases, others that can really spread basically from one part of the city to another to another city to another country or even in the tales scenario has a global reach. But there's also the risk of non-coniwmbricable diseases, respiratory diseases. We know that in a lot of cities old cars, bad fuels are used. They cause already now more than 70 million deaths a year. So health is a second, I think, key vulnerability that needs to be considered very, very carefully. Climate change I think in earlier editions of this report we were also talking about the whole trend to urbanisation and basically the run to coastal eras. Today 15 out of the 20 mega-city, largest cities of this world are all located along coastal eras. Most of them at the belt of fire which goes basically from Japan through Australia and New Zealand up to California. So huge exposures to earthquake, huge exposures to flooding, heat waves, drafts, extreme rainfall can cause food, water shortages. Already today, and we will talk about water later on, already today significant amount of people in the year 2024, more than two-thirds of the people globally, two-thirds of the people globally will be affected by one way or the other through water stress conditions. More than 10% already have struggled today to have access to clean water. So climate change is another one. And then I think the third or the fourth key dimension of risk is more societal instability. Of course rapid growth can create social unrest. Lack of access to affordable housing can create the social unrest. Use unemployment which was a key topic in the global risk report last year that has not kind of obviously used unemployment is another key source of social unrest. So when you think about this, you see that urbanisation on one hand is, on one hand it's a key mega trend, has significant benefits but done in an unplanned way can really cause significant risks to the society, to the economy as a whole. So one of the key conclusions obviously of the report and the platform to be established is more about city governance, good planning, good governance, good regulation. Large cities will have increased power so cities will connect with other cities. Cities need to connect also with national states and this whole new network of city governance is a key issue and a key conclusion out of the report that should be clearly kept under consideration. So urbanisation is really a little bit the cross-road case as we say in the global risk report. Instability and fragmentation is some of the key underlying, a key underlying theme driven by societal demands, the whole question. Esbyn was talking about the mistrust against the elites, the fragmentation that we have, unemployment topics, comes somewhat together with key economic topics like for example financial crisis that we also were alluding to in an earlier report through the constraint that most of the national states and most of the cities have to really invest and prepare for the future due to the huge economic challenges they face. The level of preparedness and the awareness to be prepared is truly challenged and the third one is certainly geopolitical frictions of the interstate conflicts and the lack of governance that are really contributing to this fragmentation and to this instability. That led also in the whole perception of the global risk somewhat the shift, especially when you look to the longer term, so not look to the shorter term, look back to the years 2007 to 2014, it was all at the end about the economic risk, it was about the asset bubble, it was about financial systemic risk, it's about the new regulation that needs to come up, it's about income disparity. In today's environment the 2015 risk, especially on the 10 year time horizon, are much more looking to societal and to environmental risk and urbanisation will be a key focal era where we will see a lot of the benefits but maybe also a lot of the risk crystallising. Axel, thanks very much. We'll go to questions shortly, but before we do, I just want to ask John Drizek to just take us through some of the technological aspects of the risk report and some of the things identified in it on the technology front. John. Thank you Adrian and good morning everyone. The pace of technology innovation continues to accelerate and innovation is exciting, it's vital to progress, we want to encourage it. But I think what gets underappreciated in technology innovation is the degree to which these emerging technologies are creating new vulnerabilities and the pace of innovation is outpacing our ability to govern around some of these risks. So take cyber as an example which is now quite a visible one, but incredible innovation over the last decade, lots of visibility to the excitement of the innovation but until recently the potential vulnerabilities from the cyber security until this year or perhaps last year it wasn't front page news. But now of course it is and the risk is very substantial. A recent estimate was at the cost of cyber attacks globally now is around 400 or cost society about $400 billion a year. To put that into perspective that's the GDP of Austria or Thailand lost every year to cyber attack. So it's a big number and obviously now very high on the agenda David Cameron in his meeting with Barack Obama today and tomorrow has cyber security as a key discussion point on the agenda. So my comments are really not about cyber but really to say well what's the next cyber because cyber is now visible but where are there areas of technology innovation where there's a lot of discussion around positive benefits but perhaps where the risk is underappreciated. So I wanted to lay out three possibilities here. One is synthetic biology. So tremendous surge in research and investment in this area the number of universities and research institutes focusing on it has nearly doubled the number of businesses engaged in this has more than tripled. There's a lot of benefits that can stem from this. Synthetic biology can help us fight infectious disease treat neurological disorders alleviate food security concerns create biofuels lots of positive benefits but there's also risk the risk could come from error or from terror error in the accidental leakage of new organisms into the environment. Terror in the form of bioterrorism by organized groups or even from individual bio hackers who have access to a lot of the developments in synthetic biology. So if you step back this is an area where there's likely to be an explosion of new product development. There's underdeveloped regulation for it. That's a pretty tricky combination that obviously produced the financial crisis in the financial sector and no one wants to see the biological equivalent of the financial crisis so we have work to do. Nanotechnology second example. Lots of benefits here as well looking at developments of solar cells healthcare products consumer goods food products stemming that build on nanotechnology but this technology also has potential risks that could be created in health environment various types of safety and these are not fully understood yet we already have 180 products on the shelf in the market that include nanotechnology. Then the third one I wanted to highlight artificial intelligence. Again lots of excitement potential for automation to improve economic productivity is there. Just last week there was Audi reported that they had a self-driving car that went 550 miles from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas. So lots of enthusiasm excitement around some of the capabilities in AI but again risk of different forms. There's an estimate now that 47% of US jobs in the next two decades could be substituted for by artificial intelligence. Think about that on a global level where that percentage could be higher outside the US and this could lead to large scale unemployment which could lead to a lot of the problems highlighted earlier by the other speakers in terms of social unrest and instability inability to fund retirement systems and other types of interconnected risks. Then think about the self-driving car beyond that risk. There's also legal and accountability questions that get raised. So with a self-driving car who's accountable for the decisions taken as to whether to harm pedestrians or passengers if that's the only choice. So lots of tricky questions around these that I think haven't been fully developed but the technology development continues to go very fast. So what can we do about this? It's not easy. We want to encourage innovation. We need to take risk in this regards but we also need to govern the risk better. So I think a few recommendations that we're making around more energetic dialogue amongst stakeholders around these risks increase funding for risk governance to parallel the funding for research in these areas so that the pace of the two stays more in line broadening disclosure standards to enable better risk assessment filling gaps in regulatory frameworks nationally and also greater international connectivity and then just generally building a culture of responsibility amongst innovators in this area and more awareness of the potential vulnerabilities that could come from it. Let me just take a couple more minutes to touch on one other risk which is Margaret mentioned earlier which is the water crisis which is more here and now risk where there have been some positive developments in practice that are highlighted in reports that I just wanted to touch on as examples of things that can be done. But first the heart of the water crisis question was a top-related risk in global risk report this year Axel already touched on the proportion of the population that could face severe water scarcity. It could be four or five billion people that are facing this type of water stress and obviously a lot of linkage to the other risks we have in the environment, geopolitical, societal and so forth and if you think about water scarcity and resource scarcity in the past wars have been fought over land and oil will we see significant interstate conflict and wars fought over water and fresh water going forward in the 21st century? The other issue with water as climate change is producing drought in some areas is equally producing floods and flood vulnerabilities in others. We estimate 15 of the top 20 cities are in flood prone zones now and that this risk while not a new one is like the emerging technologies risk is still underappreciated. We have a survey done of CEOs who are headquartered in the Lloir Valley where very significant flood risk exists and only half of them are aware of the degree to which that flood risk was prominent. So lots of issues around water on both too much water and too little water and water management obviously then becomes the core issue. So the good news is in the report highlights a couple of areas or countries where there have been significant developments in Australia, a new water management approach in the Murray-Darling Basin, extensive focus on this data and modeling that was done and connecting to water management decisions of various stakeholders making a lot of progress here. Germany as well there was a public initiative, ZERS public initiative which was a very focused effort again more data and modeling both for household and businesses to help greater appreciation of flood risk, help people make better decisions. And these are the types of things that are just illustrative of I think the general approach that we'd like to see both businesses and governments take to put more resources into risk management, more focus on the area and also invest in the data and modeling resources but also the connection to decision makers that needs to be made in order to really change the course of some of these risks. John, thanks very much. We have about 20 minutes for questions. If you've got a question, could you pop your hand up and give me your name and where you're from? And just so I can get a sense of whether we're facing a risk of deluge or not, can I see some hands there, there and there. So we'll try and take sort of two or three to go. First off over there. Hello, Ben Herschler from Reuters. Since the survey was carried out quite a while ago I think in the summer and since then the economic picture has clouded quite a bit with deflation and commodity slump now. I wonder if you can comment a bit on the macroeconomic risks and how they stack up at the moment, albeit if they've been overtaken by geopolitics. OK, so the macroeconomics, can you just go take someone there and I think we had someone just on the front row. Hi, Bill Goodwin from Computer Weekly. I wonder if you could elaborate on the risks of cyber security given the recent spate of incidents we've seen over the past year. Sorry, I missed you so I was looking at someone just there. Cyber security risks? Sorry, Bill Goodwin from Computer Weekly. I wonder if you could elaborate on the risks of cyber security given the incidents we've seen over the past year and how much those risks are increasing and what do you expect to see in the future? OK, and can I just take the lady there? Thanks. Hi, Elizabeth Broad Newsweek. I think this is a question mostly for Esben. How do you think the rise of the protest parties and the distrust in traditional parties, how does that play into this equation of instability, geopolitical instability as well? OK. Should we kick off just with picking up off the back of what John was talking about in terms of technology and cyber? I may be here from him and Axel just on the impact of recent attacks on some of those risks. I mean, have they highlighted them? Do they change anything that we see in the analysis that's come up? Axel. You know what we see, the recent events, it's basically materialising what has, among others, also highlighted in a global risk report some two, three years ago. I think cyber risk is real. John was making the example. That will not move away. I see two key elements here. One element is, and they speak about what could be done. Obviously companies need to get their act together and normally how you need to do it is not only look within the walls of your company, how to protect yourself. You need to look to the whole value chain that you have and what employers are doing for you or what you are doing for other companies. We need, and there are some global protocols on technology standards that are putting some global technology governance in place. The key element at the end of the day is also the governance around all the other aspects about data privacy, access to information, to cyber risk. That is absolutely still open and unsolved. Cyber, I think the recent examples we saw is just showing the urgency and the impact that this can have. Somewhat pleased to see, most of the, for example, Fortune 5000 companies, they have put significant efforts in terms of protection and prevention, but ultimately companies need to think about how to build out resilience, so not only how to prevent, but also then how to mitigate in case you have been quote on the victim of a cyber attack. John, anything to add? I just had a couple of things. Cyber is now coming to some of Esmond's comments, could be a potential weapon in the geopolitical side, so it's obviously the nature of cyber attacks have gone from perhaps the lone hacker to organized crime to intergovernmental issues, to inter-corporate issues. The nature of the threat is more diverse and wider. Obviously the scale has grown. I gave you the number and cost terms in terms of the number of cyber attacks has gone up by a factor of 10 over the last decade in terms of what's been being reported, and that's probably still under-reporting quite a number of them. I think there's a lot that needs to be done here, and to some of Axel's points, it's not clear who's regulating the cyber sphere and yet you need a collective action to get security. As a company you're not protected unless your supply chain is also protected, and as a government you're not protected unless you've reached some kind of understanding that's more collective in nature. I think it's an underdeveloped risk governance environment for something that's a very real risk right now. Quickly, I agree with everything that was said, and let me quickly add that in one of my former lives I was a defence minister in Norway and we were looking a lot at the cyber risk, and our assumption was that any future conflict we would be involved in in any way might take place in the sea, land and air, but it will definitely also take place in cyberspace. It could be only in cyberspace or cyberspace plus the physical world, and the connections are increasingly obvious. You could actually destroy physical infrastructure through cyber attacks. Other observation, which is a little gloomy, is that the destructive capacity, particularly of states, is far exceeds the defensive capacity, so we're much better at destroying than to protect, and while, as you said, individual hackers organise crime states, there is still no doubt about the destructive capacity that's hold by states is far higher than anybody else, and they are seemingly being employed in certain circumstances, probably much less that they could have because of some sense of mutual fear of going into a world where we are doing this on a large scale, but it's really, really something to watch, and it has a lot to do with the failure to have a proper internet or cyber governance system in the world. There are no easy answers to that, but one of the things the World Economic Forum is doing now is trying to gather people who are interested in this space of better internet governance, understanding the private and public dimension of cyber security and actually have a global dialogue about these issues because we better start a dialogue before the problem is exacerbated even further. Eswyn, thanks, and do you just want to come in on that point about the rise of protest parties? Elizabeth, from Newsweek. Definitely a major issue. It relates to the trust issue because we have, we see a deterioration of trust between governments, but also between governments and those governed. An interesting observation, for instance, in Europe, and Europe is a good example, is that if you compare Europe of the last decade when the financial crisis really hit Europe to the 1930s, the really good news was that in the early the first decade of the 21st century, we actually used collective institutions to try to deal with this collectively with reasonable success. Whereas in the 1930s, the idea was to export the problem from one country to another with the known tragic catastrophic effects. Now, the ability of governments to cooperate in democratic societies also depends on the mandate they get from the citizens. So if you have a rise of anti-foreigner, anti-integration movement that gets significant political clout, that mandate may be taken back, which will then in turn reduce the capacity to deliver collective responses. At the same time, one of the drivers of this development is precisely the perceived inability of the collective to deal with this issue. So the trust issue between and in governments is very significant and again another trend to watch. It's not all gloomy because certain predictions a few years ago on specific countries would suggest an even faster growth, which did not happen, but the jury is still out if the institutions are able to cope with the economic challenges in time before they actually lose the mandate from the population. Margaret, can I just turn to you on the point that's been made about macroeconomic factors and how they've shifted since the actual survey was done? First of all, we see that since the last year, since 2014, the economic risks became stayed more or less the same. They were not reduced, they were just taken over by other risks. And there's indeed a danger of complacency that we've highlighted in the report to say that we're not out of the woods yet. There's a lot going on in this area. We should not lose them from the radar screen because there are many shifts that are coming up. One of them is deflation. It was mentioned earlier. It can fuel the risk of fiscal crisis or death crisis in general in a number of countries so there are significant risks to be expected if deflation continues. The slowdown in emerging markets where unemployment could become also higher. There's still a lot going on in this space that we're certainly capturing already because these were also longer ongoing trends as well. The sense is that the economic risk hasn't gone away but it's slightly been overtaken by some of the geopolitical and other risks. Gentleman there, question on the front row and personal middle. Can we take those three? Can we get a microphone to you so we can all... So we need a microphone there, one in the middle and then just over there. Fantastic. Stefan Jacobsen from the OECD. As you are aware, the international community and world leaders will meet in Japan in Sendai in March 2015 to update the world strategy for disaster reduction. What are the messages that you would like to bring to them? How can you sort of help government chief risk officers do a better job? OK, good question. Gentleman on the front row. Phil Aldrich at the times. I just wondered if you could be more specific about some of the interstate conflict risks, namely the countries which you believe will be most likely to be in conflict. And with regard to that also, you talked about the water risk conflict around water so expanding out from the Ukraine, Russia or China, Japan to include like real potential future conflicts over water where those might be. And does all of this suggest that governments need to increase defence spending, whether it be protection or aggression or cyber or do we need to see a big step up in defence spending by governments? OK, and just a question behind you. Thanks, Sashin Outer from the Economist. To build on that question actually, I wonder whether you can expand a bit more on energy risk in particular, seeing crude heading for $40 a barrel. And I don't just mean in the short term, in the longer term for the balance of power in the world and the types of states that might get into conflict with each other and who may need to reassess their role in the world. Thanks. I don't know if we should ask a former defence minister about increasing defence spending. Seems like an open goal. But just to sort of take some of those in reverse order, if you like, energy obviously changing the dynamic in terms of some of the risks that you've identified, underpinning some of the geopolitical risks, water, where are the key flashpoints where we might see conflict, and then the question on defence spending. And as you took us on the water point, can I just turn to you first, John? Sure. So, I mean, what I'm painting in this picture in the conflict of water is not to put specific names of countries that are likely to come into conflict. But if you said where are the water scarcity issues likely to be greatest, India, Middle East, these are areas where probably the most severe water stress will be. And then obviously those who need water, there's then going to be need and access to supply of water. Say where is fresh water supply today? There's an estimate that was done by Liam Fox, which said that 47% of the world's population lives on a freshwater supply from the Tibetan plain. So if you start to paint a picture of, okay, that's where some of the freshwater is, there's other sources of it, there's going to be scarcity in other places, that sets up the potential for geopolitical conflict between those who have it and those who don't, and some of the dynamics of the politics that might surround it. It's not unlike what you'd see in the energy dynamics today between states who are oil producing versus those who are big consumers of oil. So I'd say not trying to be specific about the conflict, but it's really that same tension could be in the system around water that you might find today in oil. Just in terms of just hitting that defence piece, is one of the subtext of this report an injunction to governments to spend more on defence? I would say paradoxically if the whole world spent more money on defence, nobody will be more secure, just be more weapons but not more security. Of course for individual countries that could be a choice depending on their circumstance, and there is of course in analysing the most likely risk to an individual country, countries may be warned, may be advised to say, was the things that we were doing over the last 20 years the most typical challenge of the future, are there all the things that one should look for? But I think from the world at number four, my appeal is to invest more in cooperation, international organisation and diplomacy, because many of the issues, the geopolitical crisis relates to a lack of trust, and the lack of trust cannot in itself be sold by defence spending, but by actually trying to reach out and find some kind of common understanding of where to go from here. And it's in a sense a typical feature of power shifts and kind of meeting points between the spheres of influence that we're seeing now in Ukraine, and let me also point out that when we say, when we talk about the return of geopolitical or strategic competition, it does not have to be violent open conflict. It can also be the application of economic tools to undermine an adversary without actually leading into a violent conflict which suggests again that the interplay between the geopolitical and the economic is even more obvious than it may have been to many of us for the last 25 years, but in many ways back to normal as it used to be in human history previously. So just to bring back, I think, to a little bit to Philip's question, the issue of oil underpinning this, that was one of the issues identified as a cause of the collapse of the former Soviet Union which gave us that 25-year period you were referring to, the decline in the oil price. Is there a sense now that what's happening in the oil markets is going to drive some of this geopolitical tension in the 10-year time horizon? If I may, I mean, there's, of course, first it's important to remember a lot of countries actually benefit from lower oil prices, so it will have some positive effect on large parts of the global economy. But of course, if you look, for some of the typically monocultural oil and gas producing countries, it can have severe effect if it continues, and it is an interesting fact to see that the Putin years in Russia coincides quite neatly with the rising oil price until now. Now, you have the combined effect of a severe fall in oil prices and heavy sanctions at the same time, and it's an interesting question what that would lead to for the Russian economy. Another issue to watch is whether gradual independence of the US from Middle Eastern oil will change the historic relationship between the Middle East and America and where actually the US might be less inclined to be the power that attempts to bring some order to the Middle East, whereas Eastern countries like India and China may feel that they are drawn more into it because they have become more dependent on oil exports from that part of the world, and that I think can fuel some interesting geopolitical shifts. Right. So, any message for the OECD meeting coming up in March? I think two aspects come to mind. One is that public-private is key and I think probably still underestimated in this respect with respect to disaster risk reduction, and then the other one that preparation instead of reaction is more important, so to shift the investment and much of the development aid more into the preparation rather than the reaction to disasters, preventing disasters and reacting to them, but indeed extreme weather events second most likely and hugely important going on. Right. I'm just keeping an eye on time. We've probably got time for one more round of questions. So, if we get work across the room, start over there and we'll try and whiz round and take in everybody until we get to Lady on the Far side there. Hello. Judith from Agencia Fespeins International Newswire. Going back to the main risk in your report, apart from interstate conflict for resources, can you elaborate on the threat of terrorism, what you see as the causes and your recommendations? You know, especially in the asymmetrical context. Terrorism. Hi, I'm Clarissa Dan from Trade and Forfeiting Review, referring to the global financial crisis and the risks that push that into play. What do we think about the heightened regulatory issues going on, all the compliance that's coming in, and is that actually pushing more finance systems underground into non-bank arenas and what risks does that produce? Okay. I'm just taking two more over there. Matthew Favaz from Infrastructure Investor. You mentioned a big potential for public private partnerships in infrastructure. In developing economies, what's missing for this to happen more and what form could it take? Okay. I'm just going to break those down because otherwise we'll go into a sort of multi-stack of questions. So we'll try and fit in one more round to make up for everyone in the middle and across. Margaret, can I just get you to take that point first and maybe also just address that issue of heightened regulation and whether or not it's driving a certain economic activity underground? Well, I think it's actually the opposite which is true. What we highlight is that one of the biggest challenges is what is being driven underground in terms of the financial sector. We're taking the opposite view on it. We're actually recommending that the next step in terms of financial regulation would be the regulation of the shadow banking sector and anything that's not on the first radar screen. So that's if that's the answer to your question. The question from the gentleman just... On the carers and recombination. So on the causes of the terrorism obviously it's very, very complex on the public and private. Oh, sorry. So on the public and private I think especially in developing countries and each country is very different. It's very difficult to have a generic response to why public-private doesn't work. In many countries the relationship between the public and the private sector is very complex. It's fraud. I trust at the international level. There's very often lack of trust also between the public and the private sector. The relationships are because of historical reasons and are not prone to fostering collaboration. So a lot of this baggage needs to be cleaned up. And this is especially the case in developing countries. Either there is too much of a distance between the public and the private sector or the public and the private sector act too close. So these are two common issues that we see emerge a lot. And we are now looking at having a session at the annual meeting in Davos next week to discuss what are the barriers to public-private collaboration. Not just in infrastructure but also in other areas where it gets even more complex because infrastructure is very often just a legal issue that needs to be sorted out for the and then the governance systems are sometimes not good enough for that. But many of the issues are also really much deeply rooted in the culture and in the relationship with the public and the private sectors. And on terrorism it is the fastest growing I think of the risk side. Can I just first very quickly add to Margareta's point that some years ago a number of investors and companies were moving out of the relatively heavily regulated traditional economies western economies into some kind of attraction of the lower taxes and less regulated the merging markets. Now we are seeing the opposite trend because some of them are discovering the negative side of lack of regulation. Actually some rules and laws and anti-corruption measures are actually a good thing for business not only for everybody else but also for business. One of the reasons why we know one of many reasons we can see some stagnation in economies we did believe a lot in a few years ago and some return of economic activity in more traditional economies. On terrorism very important, very big question difficult to answer quickly but let's highlight one thing about in more detail in the report which is a new phenomenon inside this broader terrorism chapter which is the rise of the non-state state rise of the non-state state Islamic state is something different from Al Qaeda or previous organizations because they didn't really have a home apart from exploiting weak collapse states now we are seeing an attempt to actually build a kind of state with many state like features in terrorist territories that they won through contests and are holding and that's a major change and the link between that and the global phenomenon how it's recruited, how a lot of people from other countries are recruited in to fight in Syria but also to go back and who have a completely different capacity to deal with cyber challenges with social media and so on has in 2014 taken this kind of phenomenon to a new level and I think that's what we're seeing that this is one of the fastest growing risks on the geopolitical landscape I think on the causes part I think we need a separate seminar because that's a really big issue We'll just turn Whiz through just over to there two folks in the middle Hi obviously Ben Norris from commercial risk Europe obviously all of the big companies in the world have a risk manager in place to deal with the risks that they see but obviously at the government level that role doesn't necessarily seem to be in place so I don't know if that's something that you think the web would like to see happen I think it has been mentioned before but you know the need for the country risk manager effectively Thanks Hi Mitch Totalovic from New Scientist magazine you're talking about these sort of risks of new technologies so what's the next cyber and I was just wondering are those risks higher or of greater magnitude and previous risks or is it just basically a new technologies but same level of risk as cyber or whatever came before that and the second part that question is you're talking about the regulation and international cooperation how important to all of these risks is the UN process of sustainable development goals because you've mentioned the UN climate summit in Paris which is obviously key but UN sustainable development goals is that completely peripheral or is that kind of key to some of these issues you're talking about thank you And lady on the front row just then Elaine Wells from Argus Media I was just wondering what will the impact be of the falling oil price on the climate negotiations and we've heard different theories some people say it strengthens the argument for stronger action because governments cannot longer say energy is so expensive and others have said because it will reduce government revenues it puts them in a weaker position and then also quickly the lack of trust and rise of power strategic power play between states how will that impact the Paris talks thank you Okay and there's finally just someone right at the back and then we will try and march Susan very briskly Thank you Sara Pantoliano from ODI and the Global Agenda Council on Risk and Resilience The report presents a number of good practices related to risk management and resilience which are mainly focused on multi-stakeholder collaboration related to extreme weather events Can you say something about the key lessons that emerge from these good practices and also going forward are you planning to extend the analysis to documenting practices related to geopolitical risks given their prominence Okay Well let's just begin with a very straightforward I hope which is would the world be a better place if governments had chief risk officers John do you want to address that? This has come up in prior versions of the Global Risk Report I mean we recommend that governments do have the chief risk officer or at least someone who has that responsibility to basically look across the various vulnerabilities that are faced by a country and try to put them in some type of relative perspective and prioritization to kind of guide the work in other government departments so I think there are governments who have done this you know they exist in half a dozen governments worldwide in this type of way UK is one where the Office of Civil Contingencies has been fulfilling this role but it's a practice that we'd like to see put in place much more broadly And are these cyber risks at a newer higher level than say previous changing technology risks and the follow up question was what are the processes are there any easily identifiable international governance processes where they could be quick progress on them Well I think the short answer on the scale of the risks that I'm describing whether it's synthetic bio or AI or whatever or even the current cyber level is that we don't know that there are relative magnitudes but we do know that that's in fact part of the work that needs to be done is to sort of look at the scale and scope of the potential damage but I think what we do know is these are potentially high risk areas and I think the technology pace is accelerating so like relative to history which I think was one of the angles of the question I think the nature of this risk is higher than it's been because the pace of innovation is faster and therefore I'd say the parallel would be the vulnerability we face from the innovation is also growing with that pace and yet I think the governance efforts haven't caught up to that and so I think there needs to be more they need to be focused on the particular risks and there are bodies in place to consider some of these risks but I don't think the degree to which they've been shaping regulation either at the national or international or some type of international protocol has been sufficient to guard against the potential scale of these risks Oils impact on climate negotiation good and bad anyone want to take that particular issue up from the front row when as you said there are winners and losers on both sides that process probably not good because of course it rises the relative cost of alternative energy so if some of the recent attempts to shift will be undermined by the fact that it's becoming relatively speaking more costly that would be and you also hinted at the other challenge that a serious breakthrough in the environmental negotiations requires trust because countries have to do something together at the cost and geostrategic competition takes away that trust that may have one of its secondary consequences is lack of ability to do this Lastly I guess best practices are we going to extend the risk report and look at compiling best practice so we started this year with a few best practices with weather related or environment related risks yes we want to do more in this space whether we're going to expand it into the geoeconomic space I'm not sure I'm not sure what the good practices in this area would be because we're mainly looking at public-private collaboration if there are any interesting cases we'd be happy to include them obviously and it's on the lessons it's still too early to have the lessons because we just had a very small number of practices we're just starting off on this work so the lessons will come hopefully in the next report A quick final sentence from my side is that we're not making this report principally to make you think that the world is a very dangerous place although it tends to be the purpose is of course to drive an agenda on talking about how these risks can be mitigated that's the purpose and next week we have the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum which is the former place where public and private leaders come together and many of our panels and many of our ongoing work streams throughout the year are dealing with exactly these issues in order to build resilience in order to think about issues like redundant systems in order to think about how to build trust in businesses between governments in governments so the purpose is of course to deal with them not only to point them out but we do want to raise the awareness of some of these issues because one of the macro problems we are discovering is the tendency towards short termism that in private and public leadership alike today there are a lot of short term decisions that does not seem to be informed from thinking that you would have if you took these things seriously I'm glad that you say Yasmin I think it's full of opportunities and risks and opportunities they go hand in hand and in business terms it's somewhat the trade off between risk and returns that you need to look at and that is exactly what we try to illustrate with this global risk report and to come back to one of the questions about financial governance that has improved dramatically but what we need also from a private public partnership perspective is as much as stability and as much predictability from a public policy framework and from a regulatory framework only when this is happening we can have private public for example investments in infrastructure or in other needs that are obvious so the global risk report is not just an alarming should not be seen as an alarming report but as a result and by the way we see a lot of progress when you look back over the last 10 years a lot of the topics has been addressed and a lot of risk have not fully materialised which is a very positive outcome Okay thanks to all of our panellists thanks to you ladies and gentlemen for being here there will be opportunities afterwards just to have one on one conversations if you'd like to explore in greater depth anything and all of these issues as Yasmin explained will be on the agenda next week when we meet in Davos Thank you