CAS and SOA Publish 2026 Emerging Risks Survey

he Casualty Actuarial Society and Society of Actuaries Research Institute released results from their 19th Annual Survey of Emerging Risks in March 2026. Conducted in January with 350 risk management professionals across insurance and financial service companies, the survey asked respondents to rank 17 risks spanning economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological categories.

The 2026 ranking includes several shifts from prior years. Artificial intelligence adverse outcomes topped the list, followed by greater-than-normal financial volatility, geoeconomic and globalization shifts, cyber events, and demographic shifts. Disruptive technology has been a top-three risk in past surveys, a concern that has narrowed focus to AI in 2026. Climate change, a top-five fixture every year since 2022, dropped off the list. Environmental risks remain significant but may simply be shifting from emerging threats to embedded, managed exposures. Wars (including civil wars), which led the 2025 ranking, also dropped out, though responses came in “during various buildups in the Persian Gulf area, but well before the start of the current conflict there around Feb 28,” says R. Dale Hall, managing director of research at the SOA. Geoeconomic and globalization shifts took the place of armed conflict in the 2026 survey.

The survey includes a detailed breakdown for C-suite respondents, drawing from over 100 chief risk officers, chief actuaries, and other senior thought leaders. C-suite respondents came from a variety of industries, including life, P&C, and consulting. When asked to pick the single most impactful risk for 2026, the C-suite group landed on financial volatility (25%), followed by geoeconomic shifts (19%), and extreme weather events (14%). At the category level, 34% of C-suite respondents identified an economic risk as most impactful, and 26% identified a geopolitical risk.

Risk rankings shift quickly, and a single year of data is a sentiment read more than a forecast. The longer time series tells a more useful story: technology risk has held a top-three position in every survey since 2022, even as the specific concern has shifted from disruptive technology broadly to AI. Actuaries involved in enterprise risk management (ERM), capital modeling, or emerging risk committees can use the survey as a prompt to revisit their own risk registers and ask whether the scenarios behind capital and reserve estimates still reflect the risks the market is actually watching.