The hyperconnectivity that the world is experiencing and the accelerated advancement of technology, in addition to becoming an ally for the growth and development of nations, is being perceived by authorities as a risk to be taken seriously, both the short, medium and long term, due to the use that is being given to it with misinformation.
This is one of the conclusions of the 2025 Global Risks Report presented by the World Economic Forum together with Marsh Mclennan and Zurich, in which they maintain that although armed conflicts are the main risk to mitigate this year, they should not be overlooked. that a large part of them are product of geopolitical tensions and global fragmentation that encourage polarization.
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The report reveals an increasingly fractured global landscape, where growing geopolitical, environmental, social and technological challenges threaten stability and progress. They also say that while economic risks have less immediate prominence in this year’s survey results, they remain a concern, interconnected with social and geopolitical tensions.
Portafolio spoke with Gerardo Herrera Perdomo, regional director of Consulting to better understand the data in the report. According to the spokesperson, the vision of risks for the world rests on three pillars: armed conflicts, misinformation and environmental risks that dominate the long term.
War
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“With this, what we seek is to be more proactive and less reactive, because when as a society we have to face different situations, what we have to determine is what the joints are like in which we can act like everyone. And on which fronts we can act in anticipation and others in which we already have to act on what is happening,” Herrera explained.
Conflict and misinformation
According to the World Economic Forum, armed conflicts between states are the most critical immediate global risk for 2025, and the greatest concern for almost a quarter of the experts consulted in the report, given that23% fell into this category when consulted by the researchers.
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Extreme climate events (14%), geoeconomic confrontation (8%), misinformation (7%), polarization (6%) and an eventual downward economic pace (5%) also appear on the list. Although the percentage related to fake news is not that high, for these analysts, it can be understood as the genesis of other problems.
“Here we keep in mind that the risks are not unique and isolated, they are not vectors, They are not vertical elements and vectors that have their individual life, but each one has effects on us. When you ask the question of why erroneous or incorrect information has taken effect in the last two years, it is not because today we realized that it was a situation that we already had the agenda, but because it came abruptly since last year ”, he noted.
Fake news in democracies
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Marsh also noted that the fact that disinformation, fake and deliberately erroneous news continue to represent the main short-term risks for the second year in a row, underlines their persistent threat to social cohesion and governance, by eroding trust and aggravating conflicts. divisions within and between nations.
Artificial intelligence
Trying to understand why misinformation has been positioned as a threat, Gerardo Herrera explained that here there is another element that plays an important role and that is artificial intelligence, which has allowed us to do things that were previously impossible or took more time, in an agile and much more economical way.
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“Before, when generating content, you had to have experts to alter the information you wanted and then a characterization had to be generated to make it more relatable. Although that was limiting at the beginning, when artificial intelligence enters, what it does is that it begins to alter those two conditions,” he said.
Marsh’s spokesperson also said that “artificial intelligence no longer requires of deep knowledge, but it itself is the one that generates it and from there comes a phenomenon that alters reality through misinformation. That is why it becomes absolutely critical and jumps to number one without having appeared on the main days in the previous year”, making it clear that it is a topic that cannot be taken lightly.
Thus, those responsible for the study warned that the long-term outlook is clouded by technological risks related to disinformation, misinformation and the adverse results of AI technologies.
Climate change
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“Rising geopolitical tensions, fracturing global trust and the climate crisis are testing the global system like never before,” said Mirek Dušek, Executive Director of the World Economic Forum. “In a world marked by deepening divisions and cascading risks, global leaders have a choice: foster collaboration and resilience, or face increasing instability. “The stakes have never been higher.”
Climate change
A third factor that also worries experts derives from the environmental risks that dominate the long term, with extreme climate events, loss of biodiversity and collapse of ecosystems, critical changes in the planet’s systems and scarcity of natural resources, leading the ranking. 10-year risks.
“The fifth environmental risk in the top 10 is pollution, which also It is perceived as a main short-term risk (sixth place). The recognition of pollution (air, water and land) as an urgent risk due to its serious impact on health and ecosystems is significant. In addition, extreme weather events were identified as critical risks, both immediate, short-term, and long-term,” it reads.
The report, which is based on the opinions of more than 900 global risk experts, policymakers and industry leaders surveyed in September and October 2024, paints a bleak picture of the next decade, with respondents much less optimistic on the long-term outlook that in the short term and almost two-thirds of respondents anticipate a turbulent or stormy global outlook by 2035, driven in particular by increasingly intense environmental, technological and social challenges.
Finally, more than half of respondents expect some instability in the next two years, reflecting the widespread fracture of international cooperation, while long-term projections point to even greater challenges, as collaboration mechanisms are expected to face increasing pressure and social risks such as inequality and polarization of society occupy a prominent place in both short- and long-term risk rankings.
