| Corporate chiefs from different countries have radically different fears and anxieties going into 2022, with the World Economic Forum’s annual appraisal of global risks revealing the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown up a kaleidoscope of concerns.
Carolina Klint, risk management leader at insurance broker Marsh – which co-authored the report – said the document’s theme was “divergence”, reflected in the widely varying views of 12,000 executives from 124 countries who were surveyed.“The outlook for the global economy is highly uncertain, and that is what we’ve seen in the responses this year – it’s just fragmenting,” she said.
Chinese executives branded “extreme weather events” as their prime concern, but “climate action failure” could muster only 23rd place on their risk ranking. “The planet is actually surrounded by a floating junkyard of human-made space debris – discarded rocket parts, broken satellites – and they’re moving around the earth at about 17,000 miles an hour,” Ms Klint said.