The Global Risks Report 2026

Insight Report: Key Findings (7)

​Global Risks In-Depth: Infrastructure Endangered
Mass digitization and electrification are reshaping economies and changing the nature of pressures on critical infrastructure – the provision of power, water, transport and communications. Demands on that infrastructure are rising as economies and populations grow, and as new sources of demand emerge. For example, it has been estimated that the power needed by AI data centres in the United States alone could rise 30 times within the next decade. Additionally, interdependencies among different areas of critical and ageing infrastructure are a key concern. For example, during a blackout, water supply that depends on digitized networks might be impacted and nuclear power plants that require water for cooling may be forced to limit their operations as a result. 
 
In the Global Risks Perception Survey 2025-2026 (GRPS), Disruptions to critical infrastructure has increased four positions to #22 and two positions to #23 on a two- and 10-year timeframe respectively, reflecting increasing global concerns by respondents compared with last year. National level data from the Executive Opinion Survey 2025 (EOS) also suggests that business leaders are attaching importance to the risk of Disruptions to critical infrastructure over the two-year time horizon. It ranks #6 in Oceania, #7 in Central Asia, and #10 in the Middle East and Northern Africa. It appears among the top five reported risks in 13 countries and within the top 10 in 39 countries. 
 
In the global perceptions data of the GRPS, respondents identified Disruptions to a systemically important supply chain, Economic downturn and Insufficient public infrastructure and social protections as leading consequences of Disruptions to critical infrastructure. 
 
Three sets of risks that could lead to more and worsening disruptions to critical infrastructure will need addressing over the next decade: First, much of the critical infrastructure in OECD countries, such as transport networks, power grids and water systems, was built in the initial post-World War II decades and will require costly maintenance and upgrading. Until that happens, it is likely to only become more fragile, with a higher risk of failures or accidents. Similarly, across low-income countries, while there is an opportunity to leapfrog towards building new, modern infrastructure, the scale of financing needed may be prohibitive, even though such investment is sorely needed: According to one estimate, firms in low- and middle-income countries lose at least $300 billion every year due to unreliable transport, electricity and water infrastructure.
 
Second, more frequent and more intense extreme weather events are likely over the coming decade, generating a wide range of risks to critical infrastructure. And third, geoeconomic confrontation is likely to amplify existing challenges to critical infrastructure in the physical, cyber and cyber-physical realms. 
 
As these three sets of risks mount and interact with each other, the cascading impacts of, for example, electricity or water supply interruptions could increasingly disrupt everyday life for citizens and complicate business operations. Insurability of critical infrastructure failures could decline and more of the financial burden of recovering from related risk events will fall on individuals and organizations. If citizens experience mounting losses, trust in infrastructure providers could deteriorate and, by extension, trust in the ability of the state itself to ensure provision of basic services and to protect its citizens. Moreover, when critical infrastructure failures do occur, vulnerable populations are often the hardest hit, contributing further to already-high inequality and societal polarization.
 
Ageing systems, silent failures 
Just as pressures around debt refinancing are mounting and making it more difficult for governments to support funding of large infrastructure projects, significant expenditures on new infrastructure as well as on maintenance or retrofitting will be required. Where technological obsolescence of existing infrastructure makes it too difficult to align with and connect to advanced technologies, complete overhauls may be needed. 
 
Efforts to make critical infrastructure more resilient over the last two decades have placed a heavy emphasis on handling potential terrorist attacks. While still an important consideration, additional fundamental concerns are emerging, such as corrosion of piping, cracks in concrete structures or shifting of foundations, as well as inadequate slack in systems. It is not far-fetched, for example, to envisage a scenario in which the quality or supply of drinking water in an OECD country becomes compromised due to accidental systemic failures resulting from maintenance issues. Such risks can build silently in the absence of adequate monitoring, and sudden problems or collapses can occur. When they do, the costs to operators or governments of urgent fixes or workarounds, as well as responding to liability claims and reputational damage, can be huge. 
 
When much of the existing infrastructure in the OECD was built 50-70 years ago, the risk landscape was different. Today, mass urbanization, rising traffic, much higher data transmission and storage requirements, climate-change impacts, and the weaponization of infrastructure in hybrid warfare are priority considerations. Over the next decade, the focus will need to shift towards managing and mitigating more complex threats, including managing the higher costs of energy and key materials as the top barrier to greening infrastructure.
 
In addition, talent and/or labour shortages are likely to slow efforts to modernize critical infrastructure. The retirement of the baby-boomer generation is leading to a significant loss of expertise. This relates to maintenance and upgrading, but also to future infrastructure building. For example, while today nuclear power is being embraced by many governments as a critical source of baseload power, with significant buildout plans being announced, the size of the experienced workforce for the nuclear sector in many countries is very limited, given that over several decades only a small number of new nuclear reactors have been built outside of China. As of October 2025, of only 64 nuclear reactors under construction worldwide, 33 were in China. Similarly, 63% of data-centre executives cite a shortage of skilled labour as their top challenge.
 
Climate costs 
Modern economies’ critical infrastructure is becoming increasingly vulnerable to both chronic climate risks, such as sea-level rises, and acute extreme weather events, including extreme heat, forest fires, floods and storms. Economic losses from natural disasters are steadily rising. 
 
For example, extreme heat can place energy grids under strain because of spiking use of air conditioning, or cause rail and roads to melt or buckle. Solar panels can become less efficient in extreme temperatures, or become damaged by hail, with hailstorms becoming more intense over time.88 Many buildings need adaptation in the face of more frequent and more intense heatwaves, while more intense rainfall can overwhelm outdated drainage systems. Extreme weather is also likely to permanently increase the costs for water treatment, whether because of extreme heat damaging water infrastructure or due to increased salination. 
 
High-impact extreme weather events can cause severe and lasting disruptions to critical infrastructure. Yet, worldwide, mitigation is often viewed as costly and so can be delayed given seemingly more urgent demands on budgets in both the public and private sectors. As the number and intensity of extreme weather events is likely to continue rising in a warming climate, so the scale of both direct critical infrastructure impacts and knock-on economic and societal risks is only likely to go up over the next decade. Indirect critical infrastructure damage from extreme weather events, for example via flooding causing a failure of utility services, is potentially even a much larger risk than the direct effects themselves.
 
In some cases, the resilience of the infrastructure itself may not be the issue, but rather its very relevance amid climate-change impacts. Slow- onset extreme weather, including long-term droughts, is an area of particular concern in this regard. In Uruguay in 2023, for example, two key reservoirs serving Montevideo ran almost completely dry, with a state of emergency being declared in the city in June 2023 amid protests. As droughts in many regions become longer and more intense over the next decade, there will be a rising risk that hydropower plants in some locations become stranded assets. Countries with existing hydropower that are projected to be vulnerable include China, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco and Syria.
 
Similarly, disruptions to a systemically important supply chain are also a significant risk stemming from extreme weather events affecting critical infrastructure. During the Panama Canal drought of 2023–2024, falling water levels forced a one-third reduction in the number of ships transiting. This led many vessels to re-route, significantly raising shipping costs and leading to delivery delays, shortages and price rises in, for example, some fruits and vegetables in markets as far afield as the United Kingdom. Similarly, low water levels in the Rhine and Danube rivers in 2018, 2022 and 2025 increased costs and slowed deliveries of raw materials and components to important Western European industrial hubs, in some cases leading to permanent re-routing of supply chains. The EOS findings reflect this interdependence of risks: countries in which executives report a higher perceived risk of Disruptions to critical infrastructure also tend to report a higher perceived risk of Disruptions to systematically important supply chains. 
 
Over time it could become more common for the impacts of extreme weather events on critical infrastructure to become permanent. For example, coastal infrastructure – roads and railways as well as port infrastructure – could be steadily eroded and operations frequently halted because of flooding, as waters may not eventually recede. Ensuing disruptions to global trade are likely to become more severe over time. The knock-on impacts of critical infrastructure being damaged or rendered unusable (whether temporarily or permanently) by extreme weather events are likely to be especially consequential in low-income countries, where adaptive capacity is more limited. 
 
In a significant number of locations worldwide, entire cities are sinking, in some cases faster than global sea levels are rising. This represents arguably the most severe example of permanent damage to critical infrastructure. The primary drivers of sinking cities are groundwater extraction, the weight of a city’s infrastructure in relation to its soil type, and geological shifts. Extreme weather events can also be a contributing factor, accelerating erosion and sediment displacement, which destabilizes the ground. As this trend continues, all areas of critical infrastructure located in these cities risk being affected by more frequent flooding, damage to building foundations and other factors. 
 
A new front for warfare 
Given its strategic role in underpinning defence and security, as well as in societal resilience, critical infrastructure is increasingly in the spotlight in discussions of the risks of geoeconomic confrontation and state-based armed conflict. 
 
In many countries, ownership and operations of critical infrastructure involve foreign operators, which means that continuity of essential services may depend on the stability of commercial and political relationships rather than solely on domestic capabilities. Governments are increasingly worried about the potential use of “back doors” in digitized components of critical infrastructure. 
 
Natural resource endowments such as rare earths or production of sought-after industrial components can be used as leverage in broader trade, investment or other negotiations. The next decade could see such leverage being applied more frequently, weakening critical infrastructure in countries that are exposed. For example, uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication needed for running nuclear power plants are susceptible to being impacted by geopolitical tensions in some countries. 
 
With water security concerns likely to continue rising worldwide, governments with upstream control over rivers and reservoirs could be tempted to divert water to their own populations at the expense of neighbouring countries. Such actions could be in response to growing social instability and domestic political weakness, as part of escalating geopolitical tensions with neighbours, or both. Potential flashpoints over the next decade could include the Indus River Basin, between India and Pakistan, or Afghanistan’s construction of the Qosh Tepa Canal, which could diminish the flow of the Amu Darya River into Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
 
Direct physical attacks on physical infrastructure are also a rising feature of state-based armed conflict. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, all categories of critical infrastructure in Ukraine have repeatedly been targeted. Elsewhere, undersea cables have been cut,104 and airport operations have repeatedly been interrupted by drone activity. Global satellite navigation systems, which help to ensure safe maritime and air transport, and also are used in supply chain logistics or agritech, have been targeted with jamming and spoofing of signals. These attacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. While governments appear to be the leading perpetrators, risks are rising of non- state actors purchasing commercial technologies that could be used for jamming and spoofing. 
 
As critical infrastructure becomes more digitized, automated and interconnected, industrial control systems and devices can become insufficiently secured and monitored, and therefore vulnerable. The risks of cyber-physical failures are rising, for example from cyberattacks exploiting weaknesses in energy management software. In 2024, vulnerabilities in solar energy systems that could have compromised four million solar systems in 150 countries were highlighted by a group of so-called “ethical hackers.” On 7 April 2025, the Bremanger dam in Norway suffered a cyber- physical attack, leading to the unplanned release of water. Such disruptive and potentially dangerous activities are attractive targets for adversarial governments or criminal groups, as they can often plausibly deny involvement, complicating diplomatic, legal or military responses. 
 
If such disruptions escalate in the coming years, attitudes in already-strained societies towards governments suspected of involvement in attacks could harden. The line between cyber-physical attacks and kinetic warfare might start to blur. In parallel, trust in governments that consistently fail to ensure security and uninterrupted basic service delivery could be dented further. 
 
Actions for today 
Public-private partnerships will remain essential to future infrastructure buildouts and to reducing infrastructural vulnerabilities over the next decade. Building resilient public infrastructure requires close collaboration and information-sharing between the public-sector and private infrastructure providers, at both national and cross-border levels, particularly given how deeply embedded private-sector operators are in other countries’ critical infrastructure. The rapid pace of change and rising complexity of systemically important critical infrastructure requires trusted working relationships between all key stakeholders to harness the dynamism and agility of the private sector. For example, when faced with Disruptions to a critically important supply chain, Corporate strategies built on sophisticated foresight tools can help to minimize operational impacts on critical infrastructure projects in which the companies are participating.
 
As extreme weather events are anticipated to increase in intensity over the next decade, climate considerations should be at the forefront of infrastructure development. Climate-adaptive design, such as fire-resistant construction in wildfire zones, reduces building failure risk, safeguards health and limits business disruption, inventory losses and liability. While upfront costs may be higher, they can often be offset by long-term savings in maintenance and insurance.
 
Finally, the monitoring of industrial control systems and devices should be prioritized to ensure infrastructure remains resilient to cyber- physical failures. Monitoring of this hardware and software should provide the visibility needed to determine whether an incident stems from a cyberattack, technical failure or human error. This enables organizations to respond more effectively, recover faster and strengthen their defences. In a world where critical infrastructure is increasingly digitized and targeted, treating this monitoring as a core operational necessity is essential. It requires collaborative efforts from those operating equipment and managing processes, cybersecurity staff, the C-suite and governments. 
 
World Economic Forum, Geneva, Switzerland.