What a ‘Future Risks Ranking’ says about climate threats

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Hollywood awards honor those stars who performed admirably the preceding year.  They are not referendums on the current performance of Tinseltowners.  This leads to some optically weird outcomes – like Will Smith receiving the 2022 Academy Award for Best Actor minutes after brutally smacking the awards host on the face. 

But hey, he was great in 2021’s King Richard – and that’s what the award is all about: past performance.

The same retrospective bias is true, I think, of the Axa Future Risks Report, the 2024 edition of which was published earlier this month.  These are annual rankings of global risks that aggregate the views of two groups: an expert panel of 3,000, and a 20,000 “representative sample” of the general population.  These people are to Axa what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is to the Oscars.

The surveyed individuals are asked to rank their top five future risks, “based on their potential impact on society over the next five to ten years.”  Axa presents them with a choice of 25 risks so things don’t get out of hand. 

Looking at the lists from the past few years, I can’t help but see a lot of recency bias in the results. For instance, “Pandemics / Infectious Diseases” was the top-ranked risk for 2020.  For sure, the world was in the grip of the COVID-19 crisis back then – but just two months after that year’s rankings debuted (October 2020), vaccines started to roll out, helping bring an end to the immediate crisis (although, lest we forget, COVID deaths in the US actually peaked in 2021).