Page 21 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

economic risk will be confined to the economic sphere or that an
environmental risk won’t have repercussions on risks of a different

nature (economic, geopolitical and so on) is no longer tenable. We
can all think of economic risks turning into political ones (like a
sharp rise in unemployment leading to pockets of social unrest),
or of technological risks mutating into societal ones (such as the

issue of tracing the pandemic on mobile phones provoking a
societal backlash). When considered in isolation, individual risks –
whether economic, geopolitical, societal or environmental in
character – give the false impression that they can be contained

or mitigated; in real life, systemic connectivity shows this to be an
artificial construct. In an interdependent world, risks amplify each
other and, in so doing, have cascading effects. That is why
isolation or containment cannot rhyme with interdependence and

interconnectedness.

The chart below, extracted from the World Economic Forum
[6]
Global Risks Report 2020, makes this plain. It illustrates the
interconnected nature of the risks we collectively face; each

individual risk always conflates with those from its own macro
category but also with the individual risks from the other macro
categories (economic risks appear in blue, geopolitical in orange,
societal in red, environmental in green and technological in

purple). In this manner, each individual risk harbours the potential
to create ricochet effects by provoking other risks. As the chart
makes clear, an “infectious diseases” risk is bound to have a
direct effect on “global governance failure”, “social instability”,

“unemployment”, “fiscal crises” and “involuntary migration” (to
name just a few). Each of these in turn will influence other
individual risks, meaning that the individual risk from which the
chain of effects started (in this particular case “infectious

diseases”) ends up amplifying many other risks not only in its own
macro category (societal risks), but also in the other four macro
categories. This displays the phenomenon of contagion by
systemic connectivity. In the following sub-chapters, we explore

what the pandemic risk might entail from an economic, societal,
geopolitical, environmental and technological perspective.

20