The Covid-19 pandemic has cost more than 6.6 million lives and had a devastating impact on the global economy. It has also left many people asking if and when something like this could happen again. Statistician Abdullahi Alim is not only asking this question but also trying to answer it. As the head of Project 2030 with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) — the world's biggest business organization, with over 45 million members — his job is to predict the next global catastrophe and help political and business leaders prepare for it.
Made for the job
Alim, 30, may be the ideal person for this job, having been born into catastrophic circumstances in Somalia, in eastern Africa. When he was three, he and his family fled a violent civil war in their homeland, moving to Kenya and then to Perth, in Australia. "I was born into the triple whammy," he told Fortune magazine. "A famine, a collapse of the state and the rise of insurgency groups. And so, working on risks, on mitigating potential future catastrophes, is deeply personal to me."
Alim used to work for the World Economic Forum (WEF), where he founded The Davos Lab, the world's first youth-orientated post-pandemic recovery plan. Now based at the ICC headquarters, in Paris, he researches and models the risks of major catastrophes, including climate degradation, the use of nuclear or biological weapons and future pandemics — each of which could cause mass loss of life and economic collapse.
Avoiding catastrophe
There was a chance to mitigate the impact of Covid-19, Alim says. If, at the beginning of the pandemic, countries had closed their borders early on, "we would definitely not have seen the same death toll, the same collapse in our supply chains and the same sort of economic toll." Now, Alim is working with governments, financial institutions and other businesses to mitigate the impact of future catastrophes, but he says it's difficult to convince people to focus on possible future scenarios when "everybody is stuck in a quarterly mentality, focused on the now and the present."
In contrast, Alim began focusing on his own future at an early age. He became involved in activism, got a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Science from two different Australian universities, and in 2017, won the title of WA Young Australian of the Year and a Queen Elizabeth Young Leaders Award. That same year, he got his job at the WEF in Switzerland, where as well as founding The Davos Lab, he was the director for Africa and the Middle East of a network of emerging young leaders, called the Global Shapers Community. Alim has also written for national and international publications on topics close to his heart, including education, diversity and the migration crisis.