The WEF Global Risks Report 2026: How We Make Decisions, Set Objectives, and Perform with Integrity When Instability Is the Baseline
Each year, when the World Economic Forum releases its Global Risks Report, I see leaders react in a familiar way. They circulate the visuals, discuss the rankings, highlight what feels immediate, and then quietly move on. It becomes a useful talking point — something we nod to as evidence that the world is “more complex” and “more uncertain.” But what strikes me — year after year — is how rarely the report actually changes the way most organizations govern themselves. It doesn’t meaningfully reshape how they make decisions, how they set objectives, how they measure performance, or how they prepare to operate with integrity when conditions become unstable. It is one thing to acknowledge uncertainty; it is another thing to build an organization that can perform inside it.
For news coverage of this report, check out the GRC Report article Global Risks Report 2026 Warns of a More Uncertain, Competitive, & Fragmented World by Samuel Rasmussen, editor-in-chief of GRC Report.
And this year, the WEF Global Risks Report 2026 is far more than a broad scan of the horizon. It is a diagnosis of the decade we are already living through. It opens with a stark conclusion that frames everything else: “Uncertainty is the defining theme of the global risks outlook in 2026.” That line is not a rhetorical flourish — it is the premise for the entire report, and I believe it should be the premise for how organizations think about governance, performance, risk management, resilience, and compliance going forward. Not because uncertainty is new, but because uncertainty has shifted from something that occasionally disrupts plans to something that increasingly defines the environment in which plans must succeed.
The report is grounded in the Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) 2025–2026, with responses collected between 12 August and 22 September 2025, and it draws insights from over 1,300 experts worldwide. It then looks across three horizons — immediate risks in 2026, the short-to-medium term to 2028, and the longer-term horizon to 2036 — explicitly to help decision-makers balance what is urgent with what is enduring. That time-horizon framing is important because it reinforces a critical point that I often see missed inside organizations: risk is not simply “what could happen.” Risk is what changes the probability of success over time — and different risks distort the future in different ways.
What struck me most is the report’s explicit acknowledgment that negative perceptions of the future are mounting, with 50% of leaders and experts anticipating a turbulent or stormy outlook over the next two years, increasing to 57% over the next ten years, while only 1% anticipate a calm outlook. This is not just pessimism. This is a recognition that buffers are thinner, systems are more tightly coupled, and shocks are faster, more interconnected, and harder to contain.
So when I look at the WEF report, I don’t see it as a list of “risks to worry about.” I see it as a warning about something deeper: many organizations are still operating as if uncertainty is a temporary condition, when it is becoming the baseline operating reality.
The WEF Report Doesn’t Tell You What to Do — and That’s Exactly Why It Matters
One of the best perspectives I’ve seen on this year’s report came from my friend and risk collaborator Alex Sidorenko (who has been on my Risk Is Our Business Podcast), who said something that I think every Chief Risk Officer and risk leader needs to take to heart: the WEF report tells you what’s popular to worry about — not what to do. I agree. Completely. And I would go even further: the WEF report was never meant to tell you what to do. It is not an enterprise playbook. It is a global “risk weather report.”
But that’s the point; it describes the weather. It does not build your house.
Too many organizations read the WEF report the same way they read the news: they absorb the risk narrative, feel a sense of urgency, and then return to business as usual. Yet the organizations that are truly mature in governance and risk management do something different. They take what the report is saying, and they translate it into decision design. They ask: “If these are the operating conditions, how do we need to change our assumptions? How do we need to change our objectives? How do we need to change how we execute and govern performance?”
And this is where Alex’s RM2 translation lands exactly where I believe risk management and with that GRC must go (what I refer to as Strategic Risk & Resilience Management: decisions that set objectives). Alex said that before making any significant cross-border decision in 2026, organizations need to explicitly model how trade restrictions, sanctions, capital controls, or supply chain weaponization could alter expected outcomes. That is not merely a clever interpretation of the report — it is precisely aligned with what the WEF report is actually emphasizing. In the 2026 outlook, geopolitical and geoeconomic risks dominate, and the report notes that close to one-third of respondents selected either Geoeconomic confrontation (18%) or State-based armed conflict (14%) as the single top risk for 2026.
Even more importantly, the report explicitly states that concern about geoeconomic confrontation has deepened and broadened beyond “trade policy uncertainty” into a recognition of escalating use of instruments such as sanctions, regulations, capital restrictions, and weaponization of supply chains as tools of strategy. That is an exceptionally important line. It confirms the world many organizations are now operating in: the environment is not simply competitive, it is becoming deliberately constrained, deliberately adversarial, and increasingly shaped by strategic economic tools that directly impact operating models and performance outcomes.
This is where most risk management programs still fall short. They are very good at identifying “geopolitical risk” or “supply chain risk,” but they are not yet structured to translate those forces into quantified ranges of decision outcomes. They still talk about risk at the level of a category. But the WEF report is describing risk at the level of systemic interference with objectives.
That’s the difference.
My Core Lens: The WEF Report Is a Decision Context Document, Not a Risk Catalog
I have long believed that risk management fails when it becomes a separate universe of artifacts done for compliance and auditors: the risk register, the heatmap, the quarterly risk committee pack, the policy library, the annual assessment cycle. Those things can be helpful, but also can be very harmful, but they are not the point. The point is whether risk management improves governance and performance — which is measured by whether the organization can reliably achieve its objectives amid uncertainty.
This is why I always return to the OCEG framing: GRC is the capability to reliably achieve objectives, address uncertainty, and act with integrity. The WEF report is essentially describing a world where achieving objectives will be harder, uncertainty will be greater, and integrity will be under more pressure. In that context, the value of the WEF report is not its ranking of risks — it is the context it provides for why the decisions organizations make today will meet more friction, more disruption, and more volatility than most business planning models assume.
The WEF report is structured across three time horizons for a reason. It is telling us that risk management is not simply “here is a list of what might happen.” Risk is the evolving set of conditions that distort reality across time. In the immediate horizon, geoeconomic confrontation and state-based conflict dominate the crisis outlook. In the longer-term horizon, environmental risks remain dominant, with extreme weather events identified as the top risk and half of the top ten risks being environmental in nature. And in parallel, the report warns that technology is simultaneously transformative and destabilizing, with misinformation and disinformation ranking as a top short-term concern, while adverse outcomes of AI climb sharply over the longer horizon.
What does this mean for organizations? It means you cannot build objectives as if the next three years will be a stable runway with predictable inputs and predictable outputs. It means you cannot build performance management as if your supply chain, infrastructure, and markets will behave in historically “normal” ways. It means you cannot treat compliance and integrity as separate from risk, because in sustained uncertainty, integrity gets tested most severely under performance pressure.
The WEF “Current Global Risk Landscape” and What It Really Signals to Organizations
If there is one part of the report that executives will most quickly gravitate toward, it is the “Current Global Risk Landscape” for 2026. It is the graphic that people share. It is the headline list. But what I want to emphasize is not simply which risks are in the top ten, it is what their relationships imply.
For 2026, the top risk selections include:
- Geoeconomic confrontation (18%)
- State-based armed conflict (14%)
- Extreme weather events (8%)
- Societal polarization (7%)
- Misinformation and disinformation (7%)
- Economic downturn (5%)
- Erosion of human rights and/or of civic freedoms (4%)
- Adverse outcomes of AI technologies (4%)
- Cyber insecurity (3%)
- Inequality (3%)
The surface-level interpretation is: “We have geopolitical, economic, environmental, societal, and technological risks.” But the deeper interpretation is far more consequential: these risks create an environment where decision-making will be distorted simultaneously across supply chains, capital flows, technology systems, public trust, regulation, and even basic infrastructure reliability.
It is not simply that risk is rising. It is that risk is becoming more interconnected and faster-moving. The report describes a future where relative resilience breaks down under unprecedented turbulence defined by accelerating scale, interconnectedness, and speed. That is exactly what modern organizations struggle with: not the existence of risk, but the speed and interaction of risk across domains.
Translating Alex Sidorenko’s RM2 Thinking into Enterprise Decision-Making
When Alex talks about translating the WEF report into RM2 actions, what I hear is the evolution risk leaders must embrace: risk must become decision-oriented, quantified, and trigger-based.
Stress-test major procurement decisions by quantifying outcome ranges
One of the most practical and urgent places to apply the WEF report is procurement. In 2026, procurement is not just a commercial function. Procurement is a strategic exposure function. It is a geoeconomic function. It is a resilience function. And the WEF report explicitly warns that trade, finance, and technology are being wielded as weapons of influence.
Alex’s approach to stress-testing procurement decisions should become the default for any organization with international exposure. Before signing a contract, the question is not simply “Can they deliver?” but “What happens to our objectives if the environment changes mid-contract?” That is where scenario modeling turns vague geopolitical risk into concrete financial and operational planning.
For example, when I apply Alex’s logic, I want leaders to see procurement scenarios as quantified outcome ranges:
- Base case: current terms, pricing, delivery timelines hold
- Scenario A: tariff or restriction increases total cost midstream
- Scenario B: export restrictions force supplier change and delay delivery
- Scenario C: payment restrictions freeze money in transit or constrain financial rails
This approach aligns directly with the WEF’s emphasis that geoeconomic confrontation is no longer just tariffs, but also sanctions, investment screening, capital restrictions, and supply chain weaponization.
Integrate scenario ranges into the budget, not just the risk report
I’ve said for years that risk management fails when it produces “risk insights” that are divorced from planning and decisions (Alex and I differ as I see some value in what he calls RM1 in traditional risk management in operations, and I see a middle layer between RM1 and RM2 that focuses on the uncertainty to objectives that are set by decisions). If a risk does not alter how we allocate capital, shape operating buffers, design contingency plans, or define strategic sequencing, then it is not meaningfully governing performance.
The WEF report reinforces why budget planning must evolve. It explicitly notes that economic risks are intensifying, with economic downturn and inflation rising sharply in ranking over the next two years. It also emphasizes that geoeconomic confrontation threatens the core of the interconnected global economy.
The practical implication is that single-point forecasting becomes increasingly fragile. Scenario-based budgeting is no longer a “nice maturity feature.” It is a governance necessity. Leadership needs to see planning not as one number, but as a range of plausible outcomes tied to defined contingencies.
Create decision triggers instead of “monitoring the situation”
I cannot count how many times I have heard: “We are monitoring geopolitical developments.” Monitoring is not strategy. Monitoring without triggers is simply waiting.
This is where Alex’s third point is so critical: replace generic monitoring with clear decision triggers. This isn’t just good risk management. This is resilience engineering, because it creates operational muscle memory in advance of disruption.
A mature organization should have pre-defined triggers such as:
- If sanctions restrict access to a sector, market, or payment pathway, then activate supplier/market plan B within a defined time window
- If currency controls or capital restrictions exceed payment delay tolerances, then shift to alternate partners or structures
- If tariffs increase COGS beyond a threshold, then trigger contractual renegotiation and customer pricing response
That is how risk management becomes decision capability rather than risk commentary.
Emma Price’s Focus on “Infrastructure Endangered” and Why It Matters More Than Many Realize
One of the other perspectives on the 2026 WEF report I appreciated came from Emma Price (who also has been on the Risk Is Our Business Podcast), who highlighted the risk of disruptions to critical infrastructure; and that focus aligns powerfully with what the WEF report actually explores in depth through Section 2.5, “Infrastructure endangered.”
This is where I think many organizations fall into a trap. They scan the horizon for global shocks — geopolitical conflicts, macroeconomic instability, regulatory shifts — but they forget that some of the most consequential risks are closer to home. They are embedded in the systems we rely on every day to perform. Critical infrastructure is not an abstract public-sector issue. It is the backbone of enterprise performance. It includes the provision of power, water, transport, communications, and the digital services and networks that underpin modern commerce.
The WEF report describes how mass digitization and electrification are reshaping economies and increasing pressures on infrastructure, with demand rising not only from growth but from new sources of load; including AI data centers. The report also highlights the concern over interdependencies among ageing infrastructure, which can turn localized disruption into systemic impact. And it explicitly notes that geoeconomic confrontation is likely to amplify infrastructure challenges and create new ones in physical, cyber, and cyber-physical realms.
This matters to risk and resilience leaders because infrastructure failure is one of the clearest examples of a risk that is both operational and systemic. It is operational because it affects daily performance. It is systemic because it can cascade quickly across business services, technology dependencies, customer commitments, regulatory obligations, and reputation. This is not merely a continuity issue. It is an objective assurance issue. It is governance.
The Integrity Dimension: Uncertainty Doesn’t Only Break Systems — It Breaks Judgment
One of the most under-discussed implications of the WEF report is not simply that uncertainty is growing, but that uncertainty creates pressure, and pressure changes behavior. Organizations under pressure do not only face operational failure. They face ethical strain. They face governance erosion. They face incentives that invite corners to be cut. They face decision environments where shortcuts become tempting and rationalizations become easy.
The WEF report highlights misinformation and disinformation as a top short-term concern. That is not merely a technology or media issue. It is an integrity issue, because misinformation distorts decision-making, undermines trust, and can accelerate reputational crises even when the underlying operational event is manageable. In that world, integrity is not a static compliance posture. Integrity becomes an operational requirement for maintaining trust when the environment becomes volatile.
I often say this plainly: integrity is not truly tested when things are calm. Integrity is tested when objectives are threatened. That is when organizations face the temptation to misrepresent performance, delay disclosure, bypass controls, or soften accountability. In 2026, with instability as the baseline, those moments will occur more often.
What This Means for Chief Risk Officers: From Risk Stewardship to Risk Orchestration
The Chief Risk Officer role is changing — not in theory, but in practice. It is no longer enough for CROs to produce risk frameworks and risk reporting. Those remain important, but the environment described by the WEF report requires CROs to become architects of decision confidence.
In 2026, I believe the CRO’s true mandate is this: ensure the organization can make sound decisions under uncertainty without sacrificing integrity. That requires a shift from static assessments to dynamic orchestration. The WEF report explicitly frames a world where trade, finance, and technology become weapons, institutions are increasingly deadlocked, and turbulence accelerates through interconnected risks. In that world, slow governance becomes fragile governance. Fragmented governance becomes blind governance.
CROs must therefore drive:
- scenario-based decision-making that quantifies ranges of outcomes rather than identifying vague threats
- trigger-based response capability that turns monitoring into action
- objective-centric risk alignment that ties uncertainty directly to performance commitments
- resilience programs that map dependencies, define tolerances, and test the organization’s ability to sustain critical services
- integrity-by-design governance that holds under pressure
That is what will differentiate “risk programs that report” from “risk programs that protect objectives.”
The Conclusion: Why GRC 7.0 — GRC Orchestrate Is Built for the World the WEF Report Describes
The WEF Global Risks Report 2026 does not merely tell us the world is risky. It tells us something more profound: uncertainty is now structural, fragmentation is increasing, and the pace and interconnectedness of risk are accelerating. In this environment, the organizations that succeed will not be those with the best risk register or the most polished risk heatmap (do not get me started on heatmaps . . .). They will be the ones that can make decisions with quantified uncertainty, set objectives realistically, perform reliably amid disruption, and maintain integrity when pressure makes compromise feel convenient.
That is exactly why I’ve framed the future as GRC 7.0 — GRC Orchestrate.
GRC Orchestrate is not simply the next iteration of GRC technology. It is the next iteration of enterprise capability. It is the shift from GRC as record-keeping to GRC as a command center for governing performance under uncertainty. It brings together decisions, objectives, risks, controls, obligations, third-party dependencies, infrastructure dependencies, and resilience requirements into one coherent architecture that leaders can actually use to steer the organization.
In the world the WEF report is describing, GRC (or whatever you desire to call it) must stop being an after-the-fact layer that checks what happened and becomes a forward-looking capability that shapes what happens next. GRC Orchestrate is what enables scenario intelligence to be embedded inside procurement and expansion decisions, not trapped in workshops. It is what enables budget planning to reflect outcome ranges and contingencies, not single-point forecasts. It is what enables decision triggers to activate coordinated action across the enterprise and its third parties, rather than waiting for disruption to escalate into crisis. And it is what operationalizes integrity — not as compliance theatre, but as traceable accountability and transparent governance that holds under stress.
Ultimately, the WEF report is leaving organizations with one unavoidable question: are we prepared to operate through a decade where instability is the baseline? If we are not, then the answer is not to worry more. The answer is to build capability — the capability to reliably achieve objectives, address uncertainty, and act with integrity.
That is the purpose of modern GRC.
And that is what GRC 7.0 — GRC Orchestrate delivers, for those that truly focus on it.