Soaring risks around new fossil fuel frontiers – shale gas, deepwater exploration and the Arctic – have the potential to blow the global economic recovery off course, according to a report.

Energy companies need to adopt more sophisticated risk management strategies to take account of relatively low-likelihood but potentially "catastrophic" disasters, says the paper from the global insurance broker Marsh.

The warning comes amid a heated debate around environmental and other dangers associated with shale and other unconventional reserves. The industry says they are needed to meet a near-40% increase in energy demand forecast by 2030.

The so-called shale gas revolution in the US has led to a dramatic fall in American energy prices, which has boosted the competitiveness of domestic manufacturers.

"The global energy sector is driving struggling countries out of the economic mire, while sating surging demand for power in China, the Middle East and North Africa," said Andrew George, chairman of Marsh's global energy business.

"However, myriad financial, physical and political risks are converging to create a risk landscape that is perhaps the most complex and challenging in the sector's history."

He said a single event, such as another Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico, could damage the entire sector. Energy investors should make sure they were increasingly focused not only on financial returns but also on the associated risks.

He noted that shale drilling – or fracking – remained contentious with local communities and insurance underwriters were not always comfortable with the risks.

As for deepwater drilling, the broker warned of the "rising risk of black swan (unexpected but catastrophic) events" that meant companies must have even better resilience measures, crisis management and response plans.

The Marsh report, Managing Risk on the New Frontiers of Energy Exploration, concludes that reputational damage from a blowout in the Arctic would probably be irreparable and would inevitably be followed by a drilling moratorium.

The growing determination to exploit reserves in the environmentally sensitive region was underlined on Thursday by the Russian state-owned group Rosneft, in which BP is buying a 20% stake.

"I think the development of the Arctic shelf is going to be one of the pillars of the expansion of shareholder value," said Svyatoslav Slavinsky, the company's chief financial officer in a interview with Bloomberg television.

"How are we going to achieve that? First of all there is substantial growth that we have seen in production coming our way. We know it is a long-term perspective, however, the start of that is happening now. The first well will drill in 2014 and we expect to start producing oil five or six years down the road," he added.