Feb 4, 2026
Environmental risks remain among the most severe global threats, according to the 2026 Global Risks Report but their perceived urgency differs across time horizons. Image: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne
Sebastian Buckup
Managing Director, World Economic Forum
Environmental risks remain among the most severe global threats, according to the 2026 Global Risks Report but their perceived urgency differs across time horizons.
Short-term risk perceptions are shifting, not because environmental threats are easing but because new shocks are competing for attention.
Environmental risks now operate across multiple timelines, from immediate disruption to long-term systemic stress: responses must work on both horizons at once.
Environmental risks continue to rank among the most severe global threats in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report.
There are, however, signs of a shift, not in the underlying reality of these risks but in how they are perceived over different time horizons.
In the 2026 edition of the report, respondents place geoeconomic confrontation and state-based armed conflict at the top of the two-year risks outlook, with misinformation and disinformation also featuring prominently.
Environmental risks, which had ranked among the top short-term concerns in recent years, have now moved slightly lower.
This does not reflect a downgrading of environmental risk itself.
Rather, at a moment when decision-makers are already navigating multiple, overlapping crises, it highlights a widening gap between short-term attention and longer-term dangers and the fact that a growing number of environmental risks are already crystallizing.
Image: World Economic Forum
The issue is not that near-term environmental risks have disappeared.
On the contrary, some environmental risks now appear less as future threats than as persistent current realities.
Extreme weather is a case in point, with annual insured losses now consistently exceeding $100 billion and with wider economic losses reaching far higher.
This shift of environmental risks from anticipation to experience may help explain how they can recede in the short-term rankings even as their impacts intensify.
The Global Risks Report’s two-year outlook captures what respondents are most worried about as the trigger for a material global crisis.
In 2026, these “here and now” concerns unsurprisingly lean more heavily than before towards geopolitical fragmentation, conflict and information integrity.