Will Olympus Notice? World Economic Forum Survey Cites Climate Inaction As #1 Threat

[hatrack]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The risk that global efforts to tackle climate change will fail has risen despite concerns about powerful storms, floods, and droughts, a survey released by the World Economic Forum said on Wednesday, days before its annual gathering in Davos. The annual Global Risks Report, which incorporates the survey, highlighted several top risks for 2019 including massive incidents of data fraud and theft and large scale cyberattacks.

But the top risk by likelihood in the survey was extreme weather, in a survey of 1,000 experts from government, business, academia and non-governmental organizations. And the risk that failure by governments to limit the magnitude of climate change and adapt to it has risen to second place in terms of both likelihood and impact, compared to only fifth place and fourth place in those categories last year in the survey. “Of all risks, it is in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe,” said the report.

After 200 countries, including the United States, agreed to tackle climate change in 2015 at U.N. talks in Paris, worries in the survey about governmental failure to tackle global warming fell. But that has changed after U.S. President Donald Trump announced in 2017 his intention to pull out of the Paris agreement, a move he emphasized in 2018. In addition, deadly wildfires in Greece and California and hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina were frequently in the news. “People ... are beginning to understand increasingly the gravity of the situation and that the Paris Agreement, even if fully implemented, cannot be seen as a panacea,” Aengus Collins, the report’s author and project leader told Reuters.

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Trump, who attended last year’s talks in Davos, plans to send Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the talks that begin Jan. 22 as he grapples with Democrats over a partial government shutdown.

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-climatechange/failure-to-curb-climate-change-a-top-risk-davos-survey-idUSKCN1PA13J

[JudyM]

1. Really important.

Consider posting in GD for wider audience?