Ten years on, SONAR's aim remains helping society prepare for (the next) real-world perils

As I pore over 10 years of Swiss Re's SONAR, our annual deep dive into new and emerging risks, it occurs to me that many topics we tackled over the past decade would have made excellent material for a big budget disaster movie.

Back in 2013, for instance, SONAR analysed insurance-related risks linked to the spread of infectious disease. (Sound familiar?) An edition later, SONAR experts grappled with dangers posed by collapsing ocean ecosystems. In the intervening years, the annual publication has included ever-more-intense wildfires, earthquakes caused by drilling projects, climate-induced glacial melting, and vulnerable forests – and, critically, their relevance for our industry. It's all pretty heady stuff.

But we don't live in Hollywood. We live in the real world – a dynamic, unpredictable, and sometimes almost unfathomably complex place where risks are always evolving. In such an environment, re/insurers and their customers must be constantly scanning for up-and-coming or increasing perils that may suddenly loom large. This is the purpose of SONAR: to provide a forward-looking view of potential turbulence that may be lurking not just on the horizon, but over the horizon.

Throughout its history, SONAR has ventured far beyond the marquee threats of our natural world, too. Over the last 10 years, our risk management experts and scientists have examined far-flung themes, including liabilities lurking behind the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries, social media disinformation, growing strains on cybersecurity in an ever-more-digital world, even the competing interests emerging from the growing rural-urban divide.

In the 2022 SONAR, we touch on topics including risks associated with expanding fertility services, our assessment of how eroding trust in public health officials may hamper pandemic preparation, the pitfalls of new technologies like quantum computing, and the challenges for insurers posed by rising construction material prices, to name just a sample of this year's fare.

Regardless of SONAR's changing subject matter, however, its remit has been consistent: To look beyond the exigencies of the moment – of which there are now plenty, from the Ukraine war, the ongoing pandemic and suddenly surging inflation – to decipher often unforeseen, shifting, or conflicting risk currents. We want to move them more quickly into the thoughts (and onto the desks) of risk managers everywhere, so they'll start considering them as early as possible.

With SONAR, the most important question we ask ourselves is not simply, "Could we have seen this coming?" but rather, "Could we have been better prepared?" This is where more than a century of risk knowledge that Swiss Re has accumulated comes into play, providing a foundation not to simply try to predict or forecast the future, but to tease out risk developments and trends that may eventually be of great significance to the insurance industry and beyond. 

First, we want to raise risk awareness. From there, we want to stimulate dialogue. Then, we want to engage SONAR readers, inspiring them to take action before risks become reality. From risk detection to assessment and mitigation, emerging risk management is a means of turning threats into opportunities to build resilience.

So while I acknowledge SONAR might sometimes seem like fertile ground for the next blockbuster disaster film, the publication's purpose continues to be what it has been since its inception: to be a catalyst for well-reasoned preparation and mitigation efforts for the emerging risks of the real world -- so we can leave the really cataclysmic stuff for the silver screen (or Netflix).