All You Need to Know About the World Economic Forum in Davos





Image source- gwp.org


The World Economic Forum Davos Meeting has been in the limelight since the day of its commencement and has been gaining popularity throughout the years, owing to its theme and the ‘elite’ guest list. The 2020 Davos meeting was also a colourful event that saw people from various backgrounds receiving awards and delivering speeches around the theme of this year, “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World”.


What is the Davos meeting about?

The World Economic Forum, an NGO founded in the year 1971 with the mission “committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”, hosts an annual meeting every year since its formation, at the end of January in the mountain resort named Davos, in the Alps region of Switzerland.


This year the meeting was held from 20th - 24th January, 2020 and saw about 3000 participants from around the world.  Each year, there are specific key areas decided and this year the key areas of the Davos meeting were:

• How to Save the Planet
• Society & Future of Work
• Tech for Good
• Fairer Economies
• Better Business
• Healthy Futures
• Beyond Geopolitics

The Davos meeting also has a speciality- it is said to be one of the most sustainable international summits and has been awarded the ISO 20121 for events that are more sustainable in the year 2018.  According to the official webpage of the World Economic Forum-

“Initiatives put in place to achieve this goal include using locally-sourced food suppliers, introducing alternative sources of protein to reduce meat consumption, sourcing 100% renewable electricity, and reducing or eliminating the use of materials that cannot easily be recycled or re-used, such as carpets and introducing more electric vehicles.”
(Source: https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2020/about)


The idea of the Davos meeting, as established by the founder, Professor Klaus Schwab, was clear from its first meeting held in the year 1971: business should serve all the stakeholders-customers, employees, communities, as well as shareholders.


Events at the Davos Meeting 2020


The key areas had different speakers from different genres speaking during the 5 day extravagant meeting. Before the meeting, a pre-meeting was held on the 14th of January, 2020 for agenda setting for the meeting. Amongst the participants, there were a few who were highlighted more, like:


Greta Thunberg

This young teen who has been actively voicing for immediate changes to be brought up and measures to be taken up to save the planet, gave an amazing speech (Greta Thunberg’s Speech) on ‘Forging a Sustainable Path Towards a Common Future” and said that people have only been listening’ to her speeches but not ‘hearing’ carefully what she has been saying


Deepika Padukone

The Bollywood actress received the 26th Crystal Award for talking about mental health and taking a step forward to ensure the rate of mental depression goes down through her foundation, Live Love Laugh Foundation. Deepika said in her speech, “In the time it has taken me to accept this award, the world has lost one more person to suicide.”


Donald J. Trump

The U.S. President attended the Davos meeting for the second time and the first international summit after his impeachment trials. He was seen talking more about the U.S. economy and its growth since his presidency rather than any key areas of the meeting.


Yuval Noah Harari

Renowned author of the book ‘Sapiens’ was one of the speakers at the Davos meeting and had warnings for all the participants in the meeting. He said that there are three existential challenges to humanity- nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption; the leaders of different countries should be focusing on these.

The Way Forward

At the end of the meeting, Borge Brende, the President of World Economic Forum said that the 50th annual meeting was remarkable and that a basis had been laid for a decade of delivery. He also said:
“The National Business Council, incorporating 140 of the world's largest companies, agreed to support efforts to develop a core set of common metrics and disclosures that could be used to measure private sector progress against key environmental, social and governance goals."


These environmental, social and governance goals (ESG goals) will be measured and an ‘ESG scorecard’ will be published that will let the countries know about the current status of their environment, society and the kind of governance and how much good or bad these are.

- Shruti Singh

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