An employee of Deutsche ReGas watches as a tugboat pulls the "Neptune," a Norwegian-flagged FSRU ship, backwards into Lubmin Port to a new terminal for importing liquified natural gas (LNG) in December, 2022 in Lubmin, Germany. Germany is building several LNG terminals along its northern coasts as it seeks new ways of importing gas now that supplies from Russia have mostly stopped.
Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
This year’s Global Risks Report has highlighted the likely increase of polycrises as interacting risk events compound each other. This requires business leaders and policymakers to refocus their resilience strategies. Carolina Klint, a risk management leader for Marsh in Europe, talks with experts across Marsh McLennan about today’s multiple and interconnected crises along with the headline issues discussed at the WEF’s recent conference in Davos.
On today’s risk environment:
We’re now dealing with very basic risks that probably many of us thought that we had already figured out, like food security and access to energy, cost of living, and inflation. And the report points out an interesting point, which is that these older risks are understood historically, but that very few in the current generation of business leaders and public policymakers have experienced them. And we’re seeing this as a result of compounding political, economic, environmental, and social events that we’ve faced over the past two years. — Carolina Klint
On navigating turbulence and uncertainty:
Even if the signals for inflation and growth now are a little more positive than they were a few months ago, there are still some deep-seated challenges, and businesses still need to ensure that they are ready to navigate a lengthy period of turbulence and uncertainty in what might well be a low-growth, low-cooperation era that we have already moved into. — Richard Smith-Bingham
On the impact of climate change across the entire ecosystem:
We need to move the physical risk of climate change conversation on from just thinking about the impact of changes and changing weather on our own assets. And we need to think about that impact across the entire ecosystem. So we need to be thinking about the impact of climate on owned assets, on the supply chain. And that’s tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers, but also critically the infrastructure that connects that ecosystem. And we need to think beyond just damage, but also the financial consequences. — Amy Barnes
On the concerning low trust in health care systems:
The all-time low in trust in the health care system is a huge risk for society because what it does is it takes away our ability to address these, frankly, very expensive health care challenges that we see coming as the population ages and as we deal with the aftereffects of the COVID-19 crisis. — Sam Glick
On the new way of thinking about organizations and workforces:
What we’re seeing is a fundamental reset in how we think about our organizations and our workforces. The question today is: How will each of us as individuals, as well as each of us as business leaders, power our own journey of perpetual reinvention, where we’re continuously questioning and challenging how we are going to stay relevant for the next [iteration] of work? And recognizing that the discontinuities that we’re starting to see emerge are only going to continue to accelerate, both in terms of their frequency, as well as their quantum [impacts]. — Ravin Jesuthasan
