The World Economic Forum just dropped its highly anticipated Global Risks Report 2016 ahead of its annual conference in Davos, Switzerland next week.
The Global Risks Report 2016 analyses the perceived impact and likelihood of 29 prevalent global risks over a 10-year timeframe. It is conducted by 750 experts from the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and tech sectors.
However, nestled within the huge report are a few charts which demonstrate how cataclysmic events since the onset of the credit crisis have arguably all interwoven into one another, to eventually result in the greatest risk to the world we have today - involuntary mass migration - in other words, the refugee crisis.
Firstly, take a look at the biggest and most likely risks for the years that encompassed the credit crunch and then the European sovereign debt crisis:
WEF
Apart from the year of storms and cyclones, there's been a pretty clear state of affairs about what were the biggest risks, all financial.
This then led to a long period of income disparity - for example, the rich were still rich but the poor were just getting poorer, due to the recession and austerity measures undertaken by many countries around the world. However, that was then replaced by unrest and wars across the globe which, in turn has led to the immigration crisis:
WEF
Last year marked one of the worst periods for forced migration in history. In fact, in 2015, Europe experienced the worst refugee crisis since World War II. United Nations data shows that the number of people forcibly displaced in 2014 stood at 59.5 million, almost 50% more than in 1940.
In 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants reached Europe by sea alone. This is versus 219,000 in 2014.
So you can understand the magnitude of the issue. This WEF chart from the report shows the rapid escalation of risk it poses to the world:
WEF