Global Risks

What keeps me up at night? Two strategists reply

A field of dead almond trees is seen in Coalinga in the Central Valley, California, United States May 6, 2015. Almonds, a major component of farming in California, use up some 10 percent of the state's water reserves according to some estimates. California ranks as the top farm state by annual value of agricultural products, most of which are produced in the Central Valley, the vast, fertile region stretching 450 miles (720 km) north-sound from Redding to Bakersfield. California water regulators on Tuesday adopted the state's first rules for mandatory cutbacks in urban water use as the region's catastrophic drought enters its fourth year. Urban users will be hardest hit, even though they account for only 20 percent of state water consumption, while the state's massive agricultural sector, which the Public Policy Institute of California says uses 80 percent of human-related consumption, has been exempted. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson - GF10000086660

Accelerating environmental change poses a threat to the global status quo. Image: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Karen Karniol-Tambour
Head of Investment Research, Bridgewater Associates
Daria Krivonos
CEO, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies
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This article is part of: Industry Strategy Meeting

Nearly 300 of the world’s leading strategy executives and futurists are meeting at the World Economic Forum’s Industry Strategy Meeting. This is part of our mission to drive multistakeholder collaboration to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. We caught up with two strategists attending the meeting to ask: what keeps them up at night?

Karen Karniol-Tambour, Head of Investment Research, Bridgewater Associates

Our core societal role as an investment industry is to help people save, but there is a growing savings crisis in many countries. Savings mechanisms that rely on individuals’ decision making are increasingly common, relying on individuals to choose to save rather than to spend from a young age, and to choose how to invest their savings. But we haven’t made commensurate investments in helping people with these difficult choices, and with this shift we lose the benefits that come from pooling risk across individuals.

I think that Australia and Canada are great examples of doing it right – government-mandated so saving is automatic, managed by professionals with little political pressure, and pooling risk across people and generations.

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Daria Krivonos, CEO of Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies (CIFS)

We live in a time of upheaval. The world is undergoing a period of disruptive change, and many of the conditions and norms we have long taken for granted are challenged. CIFS sees four threats to the global status quo that we refer to as ‘Crumbling Pillars’ – a global backslide from democratic institutions and values, the end of Western technological dominance, Western-led globalization, and accelerating environmental change. Strategists and decision-makers often significantly underrate the risk of collapse from complex systems (markets, economies, nation states, institutions, global supply chains) undergoing rapid paradigm shifts. The world is more fragile than we think.

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