No shocking upsets here. Professionals from the insurance and risk management industries picked their top concern in the 2023 Emerging Issues Bracket Challenge: PFAS “forever chemicals.”

Concern about PFAS chemicals has been growing, as evidence continues to mount about the dangers they may pose to human health, litigation ramps up against different elements of the PFAS value chain, and the U.S. takes action to remove PFAS from drinking water. (You can take a deeper dive into PFAS concerns and follow some of the latest PFAS news here.)

What else did we learn?

Our Emerging Issues Bracket Challenge is a light-hearted look at what are otherwise potentially serious issues—but it’s also our chance to take the pulse of many professional in the industry. Here’s a few more interesting takeaways from this year’s results.

Largest margin: File this under not-all-that-shocking but PFAS surpassed lab-grown meat in the first round by the largest selection count margin of any other issue. (Don’t sleep on lab-grown meat though: We could be eating lab-grown chicken sandwiches before you know it.)

PFAS almost didn’t make it out of the second round: The second-round match-up between cannabis products and PFAS was the third closest contest in the entire challenge by issue selection. The second closest? Future pandemics vs. the opioid epidemic. Overall, the closest match in the entire challenge by selection count was in the first round between the obesity and opioid epidemics.

Climate risk: While the climate crisis may produce a range of potentially disruptive outcomes, Bracket participants clearly saw wildfire as a key issue—it garnered nearly twice as many selections as sea level rise.

Cyber risks: Fans of our past Bracket Challenges (we hope you’re out there) are probably not surprised to see another strong showing for a cyber risk. Ransomware edged quite close to the top and finished in the same spot in our Challenge for the second year in a row. A cyber-related issue has been the final choice in three of our past seven Challenges.

Lastly…last year’s top issue: Supply chain disruption was a major theme throughout the pandemic and was the last-issue-standing in our 2022 Challenge. This year, it fell to economic inflation, which endured all the way to the last round. Ironically, these two issues aren’t mutually exclusive—supply chain disruptions can have inflationary effects—however, economic inflation may have other casual factors and appears to be a pressing concern for some insurers for the past few quarters.

There’s also a supply chain connection with another issue that powered its way toward the later rounds: infrastructure. The U.S. is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure—some of which is oriented at re-shoring far-flung supply chains.

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