COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and Its Implications

The first global pandemic in over 100 years, COVID-19 spread across the world at an unprecedented speed. The crisis has exposed fundamental shortcomings in pandemic preparedness, socioeconomic safety nets and global cooperation. Governments and businesses have struggled to address compounding repercussions in the form of workforce challenges, disruptions in essential supplies and social instability. The COVID-19 Risks Outlook seeks to provide a preliminary picture of which familiar risks may be amplified by the crisis and which new ones may emerge, recognizing that key issues remain to be analysed – health and geopolitics among them. This report is an initial mapping that will be supplemented by further work including the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report.