Why the Next Decade Won’t Look Like 2010–2018 in Terms of Risk

At the start of 2020, the official global risk map looked oddly abstract. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report was full of things that sounded long term and distant: climate action failure, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, water crises, cyberattacks. Infectious disease barely registered in the top 10 by likelihood.

Five years, one pandemic, two major wars, multiple climate records and a global rate shock later, that list reads less like a forecast and more like a journal. The interesting question now isn’t whether those risks were “right”. It’s what it means for capital when yesterday’s tail risks have become the core macro backdrop. For long-duration allocators, this isn’t a theoretical exercise. The 2020–2025 period has effectively reset what “normal” looks like.

What the 2020 risk map was actually saying

The 2020 Global Risks Report was already signalling a regime change, even if markets ignored it at the time. On the 10-year horizon, the top global risks by likelihood were almost entirely environmental: extreme weather, climate action failure, natural disasters, biodiversity loss and human-made environmental disasters.

By impact, climate action failure ranked as the single most consequential risk, ahead of even weapons of mass destruction. Biodiversity loss, extreme weather and water crises all appeared in the top tier. Cyber-attacks and critical information infrastructure breakdown were the main non-environmental entries on the list.

In other words, even before COVID, the official message from the risk community was simple: the slow, systemic stuff (climate, ecosystems, digital infrastructure) mattered more to long-term stability than the classic financial-crisis narrative.

How the risk picture evolved by 2024–2025

Fast-forward to the 2024 Global Risks Report and the tone is sharper rather than softer. On the two-year horizon, extreme weather sits as the top global risk, with misinformation and disinformation, societal polarisation, cyber insecurity and interstate conflict crowding the rest of the top five.

On the 10-year horizon, environmental risks still dominate; failure of climate action, extreme weather, biodiversity loss and critical change to Earth systems are all in the top tier, but they now co-exist with technological and societal threats such as adverse outcomes from AI, cyber risks and large-scale involuntary migration.

Put bluntly: the world didn’t move “past” the 2020 risk set. It layered new geopolitical, technological and information-space problems on top of it.

You don’t need to agree with every ranking to see the direction of travel. The baseline assumption for the next decade is multiple, overlapping shock channels rather than a single dominant risk.

2020–2025 in practice

Look at the last five years through that lens and the pattern is hard to miss. The pandemic turned “infectious diseases” from a low-probability risk into a lived experience, and exposed the fragility of global supply chains and public-health systems.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions rewired European energy flows, pushed energy security back to the top of policy agendas and forced a scramble for LNG, renewables and grid resilience.

Extreme weather became a constant: record heatwaves, floods and wildfires from North America to Europe to Asia. The WEF notes that 2023 was the hottest year on record globally, with associated physical and economic damage, and still ranks extreme weather as the most likely global risk over the next decade.

On the digital side, large-scale cyber-incidents, ransomware campaigns and critical infrastructure attacks have moved from specialist headlines to board-level issues.

Layer on top of that a global rate shock, which was the fastest tightening cycle in decades in the US and Europe, and you get exactly the world the risk charts were hinting at: one where physical climate, geopolitics, technology and macro policy all act as potential tripwires for portfolios.

What this actually changes for capital

It’s easy to wave this away as “more volatility”. The more interesting shift is in time horizons and corridors where capital feels comfortable being locked in.

First, the nature of “defensive” has changed. In a world where extreme weather and climate policy are central risks, defensive doesn’t just mean cash-rich consumer staples. It includes grid-hardening, water systems, resilient logistics, agri-supply chains and localised manufacturing that can tolerate tariffs and disruptions. Those are precisely the types of long-duration assets that sit in the private-markets universe: infrastructure, energy transition platforms, specialised industrials.

Second, geopolitical and trade risk are now structural inputs, not background noise. The last five years have seen re-routing of trade away from some traditional corridors, friend-shoring of manufacturing, and explicit policy attempts to de-risk supply chains in semiconductors, batteries and critical minerals.

For allocators, that changes how you think about regional risk: it’s no longer as simple as “developed markets safe, emerging markets risky”. A mid-income country that sits on the right side of supply-chain reconfiguration and energy transition can be structurally better placed than a richer one exposed to tariff crossfire and ageing infrastructure.

Third, information risk has gone from PR headache to asset-level risk. The 2024 report explicitly lists misinformation and disinformation among the top near-term risks, reflecting concerns about social stability, electoral integrity, and policy predictability.

On one side, India is objectively exposed to many of the top risks. On the other, India is a clear beneficiary of several of the re-routing trends the risk reports hint at. Global manufacturers are diversifying supply chains toward India and other “China+1” destinations; technology and services exports continue to grow; and the country is positioning itself as both a demand centre and a production base in sectors like electronics, renewables and pharmaceuticals.

The coming divide inside private markets

The next decade in private markets will separate the managers who internalise the new risk baseline from those who pretend 2010–2018 is coming back.

One group will keep treating climate risk as a disclosure paragraph, geopolitics as an exogenous shock and cyber/AI risk as “for the IT team”. Their portfolios will look fine until they don’t, and when they break it will be in ways their models never anticipated.

The other group will do the boring work of adjusting their due diligence process to include covenants, capex plans, and even sector focus around the idea that multiple risk channels can fire at once. They’ll still get plenty wrong. But over a 10- to 15-year horizon, they’ll own more of the assets that can survive a messy world, not just a cyclical one.

So what do you actually take away from the 2020–2025 risk charts?

The more interesting takeaway is that the global risk community has been broadly right on direction, and broadly ignored by capital until the shocks forced a repricing. Environmental and climate risks were at the top of the list well before the 2021–2023 wave of extreme weather. Cyber and information risks were flagged long before ransomware and disinformation campaigns made daily headlines.

From here, the question is whether market participants behave as if these risks are peripheral or foundational. The sensible stance is neither panic nor complacency. Treat the 2020–2025 risk maps as a sketch of the operating environment. Then ask, asset by asset, fund by fund: does this survive in that environment, or does it only work if the next decade looks like the last one?

Research Analyst

Simran Mehla

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why won’t the next decade rhyme with 2010–2018?

A: Because risk is now multi-channel and concurrent: climate, geopolitics, cyber, and information integrity can all hit together, not one at a time.

Q: Does this just mean more volatility?

A: No. It means wider dispersion: the same sector can produce winners and blow-ups depending on resilience capex, supply-chain design, cyber posture, and regulatory/social license.

Q: What is the main takeaway?

A: Underwrite climate, cyber, geopolitics, and information risk as cash-flow and covenant variables and not as “ESG” footnotes.

Q: Where does India fit in this map?

A: High exposure to physical climate risk, but real upside from a world trying to diversify supply chains and navigate fragmentation. Net outcome depends on execution.

Sources

1. marsh.com
2. marshmclennan.com
3. World Economic Forum
4. Visual Capitalist