Two years ago, the World Economic Forum launched a Global Governance Initiative that brought together a group of experts from around the world to map the state of the world on peace and security, education, environment, health, human rights, and hunger and poverty. The initiative provides an assessment, a numeric score, of the level of effort toward reaching these goals by all the relevant actors combined: governments, international organizations, civil society and business. The maximum (best) score is 10, the minimum 1 (no effort); 0 signifies going backward.

The second annual report was presented to the community of global leaders assembled in Davos last week. Last year the world's efforts had scored around 3. This year, while most subjects stayed at the same score, we rated the world slightly more dangerous than a year ago and scored the year a 2. Why?

The Iraq nightmare continued; a new man-made catastrophe arose in Sudan's Darfur region; the situation in the Congo deteriorated; Kosovo erupted again; and murderous terrorist outrages occurred from Madrid and Beslan to Jakarta. Efforts to anticipate or thwart these events fell far short of what was needed to free the world's peoples of the scourge of war and mass violence.