[MCN] World Economic Forum: The Global Risk Report 2018 w/link

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpt from the Executive Summary: "When risk cascades through a complex system, the danger is not of incremental damage but of 'runaway collapse' or an abrupt transition to a new, suboptimal status quo. 

"In our annual Global Risks Perception Survey, environmental risks have grown in prominence in recent years. This trend has continued this year, with all five risks in the environmental category being ranked higher than average for both likelihood and impact over a 10-year horizon.”


Excerpts from pp. 11-12: "Among the most pressing environmental challenges facing us are extreme weather events and temperatures; accelerating biodiversity loss; pollution of air, soil and water; failures of climate-change mitigation and adaptation; and transition risks as we move to a low-carbon future. However, the truly systemic challenge here rests in the depth of the interconnectedness that exists both among these environmental risks and between them and risks in other categories—such as water crises and involuntary migration. And as the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico has starkly illustrated, environmental risks can also lead to serious disruption of critical infrastructure.”

"The populations of vertebrate species declined by an estimated 58% between 1970 and 2012. Globally, the primary driver of biodiversity loss is the human destruction of habitats including forests—which are home to approximately 80% of the world’s land-based animals, plants, and insects—for farming, mining, infrastructure development and oil and gas production. A record 29.7 million hectares of tree cover was lost in 2016—an area about the size of New Zealand. This loss was about 50 percent higher than 2015."

"Rising temperatures and more frequent heatwaves will disrupt agricultural systems that are already strained. The prevalence of monoculture production heightens vulnerability to catastrophic breakdowns in the food system— more than 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and five animal species, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and it is estimated that there is now a one-in-twenty chance per decade that heat, drought, and flood events will cause a simultaneous failure of maize production in the world’s two main growers, China and the United States. This would cause widespread famine and hardship. 

"Fears of 'ecological Armageddon' are being raised by a collapse in populations of insects that are critical to food systems: researchers in Germany found falls in such populations of more than 75% over 27 years." 
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GRR18_Report.pdf <http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GRR18_Report.pdf>

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"… the race between climate dynamics and  climate policy will be a close one …."

Hans Joachim Schellenhuber. 
“Global warming: Stop worrying and start panicking?” 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2008



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