Davos Forum, Covid-19, and Climate Change

The first issue concerns the endeavor of the World Economic Forum (WEF) to mitigate some of the current global crisis in Davos. The WEF acknowledges that through the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), a lot has changed both socially and technologically at a global scale. People demand better governance by voting with paradigms such as “to take back control,” markets have become globally porous, there is a new framework for global public-private cooperation, among others. In the end, the 4IR has caused the rising of severe capitalism that is propagated through stakeholder-ship. Thus, WEF finds the need to address all the major issues facing the earth and her inhabitants by bringing together 3,000 participants from around the world for a WEF annual meeting in Davos-Klosters. The 3,000 participants are leaders and stakeholders in various industries across the globe. This meeting, which has been themed as Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World, will give concrete meaning to “stakeholder capitalism.” The Davos forum will probe the global, regional, and industrial challenges facing the earth and her inhabitants, and come up with solutions.

Concerning the second issue, WEF has spotlighted that among other challenges, that the health of people throughout the world is at risk of Covid-19. Although the disease did not raise the alarm early in the year – during the forum, WEF has taken part in collecting, analyzing, and reporting in regard to the strategic trends of Covid-19. That is, the WEF has made Covid-19 a priority agenda, to ensure the availability of valuable information that will help global leaders in ensuring the sustainability of industries and regions amid the pandemic. That way, WEF has published many articles since this year concerning Covid-19. These articles regard the trajectories of infections in regions, response, and the implications to health outcomes, social, economic status, and leadership domains. For instance, a recent article by DiBianca compared the response to Covid-19 across the globe with the response to climate change. She notes that like a pandemic, climate change is fierce and that it is happening before our eyes. Nevertheless, she notes that we can combat climate change as we have done with Covid-19. Some pointers for DiBianca’s suggestion include noting that climate change will not wait, we can win by working together, adversity prompts innovation, the digital world is imperative, and leaders must be bold and transparent. Otherwise, climate change will lead to dreadful chaos, as revealed in the nest issue.

The last issue indicates that should we let the climate change to deteriorate, the earth will not just be inhabitable due to scorching temperatures and violent weather, but life will de difficult in an economic sense. The predictors on the economic impact of climate change on the world show that if nothing is done to avert negative climate change, the global GDP will fall by 25% by the year 2100. That is, the world will be poorer by 25% on average, with some country’s GDP dropping by more than 50%. This indicator is a sum of three estimates that concern the impacts of global surface temperatures on GDP, future climatic temperature change, and projection of GDP in relation to population growth.

Works Cited

DiBianca, Suzanne. “5 Things COVID-19 Can Teach Us About Fighting Climate Change”. World Economic Forum, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/5-things-covid-19-has-taught-us-about-curbing-climate-change/. Accessed 2 Sept 2020.