Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World

The report finds that 84% of companies feel underprepared for current disruptions, with a tendency to prioritize short-term defensive measures over long-term strategic resilience. It identifies critical gaps in organizational resilience and foresight capabilities, and recommends public-private partnerships to improve access to capital, macroeconomic stability, green growth, and workforce upskilling.

• A significant majority of private-sector leaders feel ill-equipped for future disruptions; 84% of companies report being underprepared for current trends and uncertainties, and 90% state they could be better prepared in their resilience capabilities.
• Companies prioritize short-term defensive actions over proactive, long-term strategies. While financial and digital resilience are highly prioritized, foundational capabilities like foresight and disruption readiness are neglected, and only 13% of companies comprehensively incorporate resilience KPIs into their strategies.
• Technology is identified as the top threat to business continuity by global executives, driven by cybersecurity concerns and the rapid adoption of generative AI. Regulatory changes and shifting market dynamics follow as the second and third most disruptive challenges.
• Organizational resilience is the dimension where companies feel least prepared. Symptoms of poor resilience leadership include delayed board-level decision-making, employee burnout, and a lack of team autonomy, with only 42% of employees feeling empowered to make decisions without micromanagement.
• Public-private collaboration is underutilized despite its potential to bridge investment gaps. Only 28% of surveyed companies engage in public-private partnerships, and 89% of those interviewed reported challenges such as regulatory constraints or legal barriers to such collaboration.
• Access to capital is a critical barrier, particularly in Africa where borrowing costs for developing countries can be three times higher than for developed countries. The report suggests blended finance and foreign exchange risk mitigation could unlock up to $1 trillion annually for green initiatives in emerging economies by 2030.
• Technological disruption poses a major risk to human capital, with an estimate that 23% of global jobs will be transformed over the next five years due to AI and processing technologies. In the US alone, approximately $34 billion is needed to upskill affected workers.
• Climate change and the energy transition require massive scaling of investment, with annual needs expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2030, up from $1.8 trillion in 2023.

APA

World Economic Forum (2025). Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Resilience_Pulse_Check_2025.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World. 2025. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Resilience_Pulse_Check_2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World |date=January 2025 |url=https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Resilience_Pulse_Check_2025.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2025resilience, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2025}, month = jan, url = {https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Resilience_Pulse_Check_2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }