With great risks come opportunities: Interview with Francesco Bosello
Technological, economic, and environmental risks are on the rise, but it is precisely in these areas that the opportunities for building a better future lie. In an increasingly fragmented world, awareness of the need to act on climate risks is growing whilst priority for action is directed elsewhere. CMCC Principal Scientist Francesco Bosello comments on the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024.
Francesco Bosello, director of the CMCC division on Economic analysis of Climate Impacts and Policy, has seen the Global Risk Report of the World Economic Forum, now at its 19th edition, evolve. Over the course of the years, climate and environmental issues have featured among the concerns of global public opinion leaders.
When teaching environmental economics and policy at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Bosello uses the Report as a valuable resource with which to introduce environmental and climate issues in the broader context of what the current and future global risks are.
“We can no longer consider the environmental discourse as a purely environmental problem or artificial intelligence as a technological problem, and the economic crisis as an economic issue. All are intertwined and all are development issues,” says Bosello. “Even though we are aware of the climate risks and we have the technological means we are lacking the political and even the social will to deal with them.”
What does the Report tell us about the way we are tackling environmental and climate issues?
It’s interesting to see how, despite risks from other sources, the environmental and climate theme remains central.
Even in a context where we’ve come from two years of a global pandemic and a resurgence of geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues have not taken a back seat. Indeed, the main global risk elements perceived by respondents — who are business representatives and policymakers and don’t come from a purely environmentalist perspective — are linked to climate and environmental issues.
What were some of the changes from previous editions?
What I noticed in this latest edition is that there are new ideas and more emphasis on things like adaptability to climate change, which in previous years was less evident, as well as a more in-depth analysis of the measures with which we can counter some of the risks listed.
In addition to being descriptive of what the main global risks are, this year’s Report also tries to interpret the implications of these risks.
Among the perceived risks one would also expect there to be the failure of environmental policies, given that environmental risks are so high. In previous reports, the failure of adaptation policies and environmental failures were among the top risks. However, this year, this aspect has disappeared.
The report concludes that there is a perception of the importance of environmental climate risk on the one hand, and on the other, the importance of climate and environmental policies or the possibility of their failure disappears from the list of future risks.
This is a significant contradiction that highlights a kind of societal impotence to face these problems. We are all aware of this risk, but it seems that we are concerned with dealing with other things.
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Francesco Bosello graduated at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, he received a Master degree in economics from the University College of London (UK) and a Doctoral degree in economics from the University of Venice.
He is presently associate professor of economics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and senior scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) where he coordinates the Economic Analysis of Climate Impacts and Policy division. He is deputy director of the European Institute for Economics and the Environment a joint initiative between CMCC and the US Resources for the Future.
Previously he has been associate professor at the University of Milan, and affiliate scientist at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Milan. He is currently undertaking research activities in the area of climate change impact assessment and the design of optimal mitigation and adaptation strategies developing integrated assessment modelling tools and applied general equilibrium economic models.
His other research interests are more broadly related to international environmental agreements and the economics of the environment and of sustainability.
