The world’s political and economic foundations are tilting toward a more turbulent era, and the consequences will fall heavily on those who underwrite risk. That is the central message from the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026, which depicts an “age of competition” in which war, weaponized trade and technological disruption collide with climate stress and social fracture.
Drawing on responses from more than 1,300 experts across business, government, academia and civil society, the report finds that half of respondents expect the global environment over the next two years to be either “turbulent or stormy,” a share that rises to 57 percent over the coming decade. Only 1 percent foresee a calm future in either time frame.
For insurers and reinsurers, long attuned to cyclical swings and catastrophe seasons, the report suggests something more fundamental: the erosion of the very assumptions that allow risks to be modeled, priced and pooled.
In the near term, the report concludes, the global risk landscape is dominated by geopolitics and geoeconomics, rather than by the environmental perils that usually command the industry’s attention.
“Geoeconomic confrontation” — a catch-all for sanctions, export controls, capital restrictions and the broader weaponization of supply chains — is now viewed as the single most likely trigger of a material global crisis in 2026, selected by 18 percent of respondents and displacing armed conflict from the top of the list. State-based armed conflict follows at 14 percent.
The report describes a “contested multipolar landscape” in which cooperation gives way to rivalry and “trust – the currency of cooperation – is losing its value.” Fully 68 percent of experts expect the global political environment in 10 years to be a “multipolar or fragmented order in which middle and great powers contest, set, and enforce regional rules and norms,” and only 6 percent anticipate a revival of a U.S.-led, rules-based system.
For insurers, that shift is not just an abstract concern. Geoeconomic confrontation threatens what the report calls “the core of the interconnected global economy,” including cross-border flows of goods, data and capital on which many commercial lines depend. Trade credit, political risk, marine, supply-chain contingent business interruption and specialty lines tied to strategic technologies all face the prospect of more frequent and more opaque state intervention.
At the same time, the report warns of “mounting debt sustainability concerns” and the risk of economic bubbles, particularly in an environment of volatile markets and high public and private leverage. Economic downturn and inflation each jump eight places in the two‑year risk rankings from the previous year’s survey, while the prospect of an asset bubble burst rises seven positions.
That combination of geopolitical weaponization and macroeconomic fragility suggests a more volatile liability environment for directors and officers, sharper swings in asset values for insurers’ investment portfolios and more stress events for sovereign and credit exposures.
If geopolitics defines the near term, technology looms over the decade ahead. The report devotes an entire thematic chapter to “AI at large,” and finds that the “adverse outcomes of AI technologies” move from 30th in the two‑year risk ranking to fifth in the 10‑year outlook — the steepest rise of any of the 33 global risks surveyed.
In the short term, it is information integrity that troubles experts most. “Misinformation and disinformation” rank as the second‑most severe risk over the next two years, and “cyber insecurity” stands in sixth place. For younger respondents under 30, misinformation is a greater concern than geoeconomic confrontation.
For insurers, those findings cut in two directions. Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics promise efficiency gains in underwriting, claims and fraud detection. Yet they also create fresh vulnerabilities: algorithmic bias in pricing and coverage, opaque decision-making that could invite regulatory scrutiny, and systemic exposures if widely adopted models or platforms fail.
The surge of misinformation and cyber risk also raises the stakes for cyber insurance itself, a line already grappling with accumulation risk, war exclusions and silent cyber exposures in traditional policies. If critical infrastructure, financial markets or health systems are disrupted by more sophisticated attacks, underwriters may find their existing scenarios too narrow.
One of the most striking shifts in the report is not the rise of a particular threat, but the apparent downgrading of others. Compared with previous years, environmental risks are “being reprioritized downward in the two‑year time horizon,” the authors write.
Over the next two years, “extreme weather events” fall from second to fourth in the overall ranking of risks by severity, while “pollution” drops from sixth to ninth. “Critical change to earth systems” and “biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse” each slide further down the list, and every environmental risk shows a lower severity score than in the previous survey.
Yet the longer horizon tells a different story. On a 10‑year view, environmental risks reclaim their place at the top of the table: “extreme weather events” rank first, followed by “biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse” and “critical change to Earth systems.” Nearly three‑quarters of respondents see the long‑term outlook for environmental risks as either turbulent or stormy, more than for any other category.
For a sector that has already revised catastrophe models in the face of warming seas and more intense storms, the message is sobering. The near‑term deprioritization of climate in policy and board‑level agendas may translate into slower investment in resilience and mitigation, even as the physical risk signal strengthens.
If infrastructure, grids and urban systems are allowed to fall behind, the report warns, “critical infrastructure requires renewed attention, with the current risks already playing out and affecting societies globally.” That has direct implications for insurability: aging and under‑maintained assets typically mean higher loss severities, more frequent outages and a larger protection gap as coverage becomes expensive or unavailable.
Beneath the individual risk labels, the report emphasizes how shocks are likely to compound. In its “interconnections map” of global risks, inequality appears at the center, the most interconnected node in the network for the second consecutive year.
Rising inequality and permanently “K‑shaped economies,” in which gains accrue disproportionately to a minority while many face stagnant or falling real incomes, are already straining social contracts and fueling “streets versus elites” narratives. Those tensions intersect with political polarization, disinformation and eroding trust in institutions — all destabilizing factors for the operating environment of insurance.
For personal lines, that may mean more frequent civil unrest and property damage; for life and health, widening protection gaps as affordability deteriorates; for public‑private schemes, more contentious debates over how to finance catastrophe and social insurance.
The Global Risks Report does not purport to forecast a single future. It repeatedly stresses that “the future is not a single, fixed path but a range of possible trajectories, each dependent on the decisions we make today as a global community.” But it leaves little doubt that the trajectory of least resistance is toward greater volatility.
For carriers and brokers, several priorities emerge from the analysis:
• Treat geopolitics as a core modeling input, not background noise. Political and geoeconomic triggers now sit alongside hurricanes and earthquakes as potential global crisis drivers. That calls for closer integration of political risk scenarios into capital planning, stress testing and underwriting appetites.
• Revisit accumulation and systemic risk across technology‑driven lines. The clustering of risks around cyber insecurity, misinformation and AI underscores the potential for correlated, cross‑sector losses from single points of failure in digital infrastructure. Traditional diversification assumptions may no longer hold.
• Resist the temptation to underweight climate in the short term. Even as respondents downgrade environmental risks in the two‑year window, they still dominate the 10‑year outlook. Aligning pricing, reinsurance strategy and investment portfolios with the long‑term signal — rather than the political news cycle — may prove decisive.
• Address inequality and social fragility as underwriting conditions. With inequality identified as the most interconnected risk, and societal polarization entrenched near the top of the rankings, insurers may need to build social indicators into their views of risk for urban property, liability and even life and health.
Above all, the report returns, in its preface and conclusion, to a theme that may sound unfashionable in an age of rivalry: cooperation. It calls cooperation “indispensable for global risk management,” even as it concedes that, “in a world with greater competition, this may be harder to achieve.”
The insurance industry, with its long history of mutualization and its global balance sheets, has a stake in whether that cooperation can be rebuilt. In pricing tomorrow’s risks, carriers are also, in a modest way, helping to decide which of the futures mapped in Davos becomes reality.
