Geopolitics and its impact on strategic risk management

What it is about

Nelson Valero, Strategic Risk Consulting Regional Leader for Latin America and the Caribbean at Marsh, presented at the Fourth Annual Risk Conference (September 17, 2026) how to bring geopolitics into an organization strategic process in order to translate external uncertainty into resilient decisions.

The 26 slides present a framework to understand geopolitics (territory, resources, technology, trade and alliances), review the global risks of the World Economic Forum and describe six vectors through which geopolitics reaches the organization: geoeconomics, climate, technology and data, infrastructure and strategic assets, energy and supply routes, and regional stability. They then propose a geopolitical dashboard for the risk committee, foresight and scenarios as a method, with examples on energy and tariffs, and five conclusions.

Objectives

• Present geopolitics as a strategic variable that is transmitted to markets, operations, technology, people and reputation.
• Identify six impact vectors and the risk questions each one raises.
• Apply foresight and scenarios to prepare decisions before the crisis arrives.

Key takeaways

1. The guiding question is whether the organization knows its dependencies and has decisions prepared; invisible dependencies are strategic risks.
2. The priority is not to assess isolated events but how they combine, escalate and affect strategic objectives: from isolated risks to polycrisis.
3. Resilience comes down to a formula: visibility, plus options, plus monitoring, plus pre-agreed decisions.
4. A dashboard for the risk committee links exposure, trigger scenario, warning indicator, prepared decision and owner; its quality depends on having real exposures and thresholds.
5. Scenarios do not predict the future: they improve the quality and speed of decisions, and diversification without visibility is not resilience.