That is the worthy goal of the report – World Risk 2013 – published by the World Economic Forum, (yes, the Davos guys). It is a pretty dense report, so, before I go into the visualization aspect, check out this handy video (there is a whole videos page) explaining how the report works:
Here is my exploration of this visualization:
Global Risks 2013 from SocProf on Vimeo.
The report also contains static images for each specific sub-sections. So, here are a few snapshots.
The overall survey results:
It is a bit hard to read but you can still spot the areas of concentration in the mini-scatterplots for each risk probability of occurrence and impact. For instance, for “severe income disparity”, you can tell this is one of the highest ranked economic risk, with a darker dot at the top right of the scatterplot. Similarly, in the societal category (red), “water supply crisis” ranks high on both axes as well.
In the video, the year-to-year scatterplot was not very useful, but this static image is:
In this case, you can clearly identify which risk perception have increased or decreased over time.
The overall network map is also pretty impressive but the animated / interactive version is more useful and readable:
The top 10 risks:
The centers of gravity (you need to click on the image for a larger view):
The impact of global warming:
And last but not least, one that is a bit scary:
Check out the whole website for a lot more material on all of this.
