Energy

WTW Research Network Risk & Resilience Review: Emerging Risks from Geopolitical Shifts

This report by the WTW Research Network “introduces research and opinions that provide new perspectives to support risk management and resilience.” In particular, this report focuses on WTW’s work in geopolitics, topics such as supply chains, national competition, and emerging risks and their interconnectivity. WTW posits that the topics covered “highlight a need for an […]

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Mitigating Global Warming is Not Our Only Problem: Are We “Sleepwalking” Towards a Global Polycrisis?

William White argues that climate policy around the world is lacking in dimensions of “should” (clear analysis of what must be done), “could” (the power to implement solutions), and “would” (the actual use of that power to address the problem). The even greater challenge, however, is that climate change is not the only global systemic

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The Great Disruption has Begun

Paul Gilding argues that the world has reached “a multi-system tipping point” that will bring “the Great Disruption”: “a destabilisation of the global climate system at a scale that is so chaotic, unpredictable and costly, it will trigger cascading disruptive change in the global economy, national politics, investment markets and geopolitical security.” Gilding predicts that

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World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023

Global Risks Report 2023

This 18th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is based on a risk perceptions survey of 1200 experts on the likelihood, severity, and interconnections between 37 global risks. It finds that the biggest risk in the next two years is the cost of living crisis, and the biggest risk in the next

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Top Risks 2023

Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan present their top ten geopolitical risks for 2023: an increasingly rogue and reckless Russia; an increasingly powerful and unconstrained Xi Jinping; the weaponization of artificial intelligence; shockwaves of global inflation; Iran backed into a corner; higher energy prices; reversals of development; political divisions in the United States; the disruptive digital

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The Breakthrough Effect: How to Trigger a Cascade of Tipping Points to Accelerate the Net Zero Transition

The Breakthrough Effect: How to Trigger a Cascade of Tipping Points to Accelerate the Net Zero Transition

This report analyzes actionable “tipping points” within global energy systems (fertilizer, shipping, power, etc.) that could produce a cascade of emissions reductions. The technology adoption needed to reach these positive tipping points is dependent on cost-effectiveness, attractiveness, and accessibility, but if these barriers are overcome, it could result in massive, self-reinforcing environmental improvements. The authors

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How the World Really Works

Against those who anticipate a smooth, timely transition to renewable energy and net-zero carbon emissions, Vaclav Smil argues that we are much more dependent on fossil fuels than we recognize so that an energy transition will be difficult and tumultuous. “The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific

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What are Cascading Disasters?

The authors argue that the world’s dependence on networks and critical infrastructure renders it increasingly vulnerable to “cascading disasters” in which “it is common for the secondary effects to be new sources of impact, which may be more devastating than the original trigger.” To help analyze the vulnerability pathways through which disaster cascades propagate, they

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The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World

Mark Swilling proposes that “we need to understand the dynamics of the current global polycrisis as the emergent outcome of intersections between four dimensions of transition: socio-metabolic transition, techno-economic transition, socio-technical transition and long-term global development cycles. When understood as multiple cycles that intersect concurrently and asynchronistically across these four dimensions, the emergent outcome can

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