Climate and health lose out in Davos as AI and war take center stage

“Climate has clearly fallen back on the agenda, and that’s a shame,” Paul Polman, the former Unilever CEO, told me during one event this week. The organization’s focus on geopolitics and AI is understandable, he acknowledged, given the wars in Europe and the Middle East and the rollercoaster evolutions in generative AI. (“Davos looks like an AI conference,” my colleague Alexei Oreskovic, Fortune’s tech editor, put it.)

But if sustainability is not a priority now, then when?

The decline of sustainability on the agenda is clear in everything from statistics to the streets. One case in point: Last year, over 60 chief sustainability officers were assigned the coveted “white badge” designating a company’s top participant in Davos. This year, by our count, that number dropped by about 20%, to around 50. One explanation: In a WEF survey, executives put climate-related concerns lower down their list of short-term risks. Misinformation and disinformation, polarization, and war took over.

Meanwhile, the number of fossil-fueled limousines ferrying the most elite participants has stayed steady if not gotten worse, judging as a Davos veteran eyewitness. Participants choosing the greener options are once more relegated to the slushy sidewalks or forced into minibuses with no priority over private cars. Dreams of a green Davos, even in this microcosmos, are far off.

As before, I did enter the slipstream of participants battling for climate action, a nature agenda, and health cooperation. I heard Al Gore deliver another heartfelt speech against the fossil fuel lobby and its enablers in a packed SDG Tent outside the Congress Centre. The sense of community and urgency among those gathered to listen to him was palpable.

I also moderated a DP World CSO breakfast and joined IKEA CEO Jesper Brodin for an eye-opening session entitled Climate Action Speaks. The CSOs in my session shared ways to make tactical progress, such as advocating for sustainability committees on corporate boards and setting up networks of climate champions across companies. And at Brodin’s session, participants were confronted with their own responsibility to take concrete action rather than merely advocating for it.

One participant I spoke to about the lack of headline climate events this year offered a pragmatic explanation. (I’m not using his name because he spoke in a session covered by Chatham House Rule.) Now that sustainability reporting is kicking in in places like the European Union, he offered, companies are hunkering down to collect their data and make sure they can focus on complying and reducing their carbon footprint. In other words, they’re in the weeds on climate, not in the snow of Davos.

But for some, particularly in the health space, the frustration of their agenda falling off the radar here as well as among governments and companies around the world, is more concerning.

“The world has moved on from COVID, and now people are stepping into old habits,” Roy Jakobs, the CEO of Royal Philips, told me. “But we need to keep putting this high on the agenda, because if you look at what progress needs to be made [in health care], we’re falling back. So we say: Don’t forget, health care is one of the most valuable and precious goods. We need to partner up on it, with a systems approach.”

I, too, believe WEF and its participants could stay focused on these long-term challenges as much as on those like AI that cause disruption today. Doing so in times past led to some of its biggest successes, as in efforts to eradicate infectious diseases: Both GAVI, the vaccine alliance, and CEPI, the Coalition on Epidemics Preparedness Innovations, were launched at Davos.

The areas ripe for such global public-private cooperation are already clear, and they are waiting in the wings in Davos. I met with George Vradenburg, who heads the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative. At the request of WEF founder Klaus Schwab, Vradenburg is catalyzing global efforts around the early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s. Similarly, the Nature Positive Initiative and other nature-focused alliances are gathering this week in Davos, bringing together businesses around a nature agenda, beyond climate per se.

But you might not have read about these initiatives anywhere else because, unlike in earlier years, they didn’t make it to the center stage of the Congress Centre. And while they have gathered a coalition, a significant number of companies and governments in Davos remain unaware of these initiatives, focusing instead on what does take center stage and in the many corporate pavilions.

So, going forward, I would argue that WEF should put these longer-term challenges back into the spotlight. It’s understandable that company executives get carried away by topics that dominate media headlines and water cooler conversations. AI is “near the peak of the hype cycle,” judging by its domination of Davos conversations this year, Fortune CEO Alan Murray remarked at a dinner here.

Davos originated as an event where business leaders could step back from the daily fray and focus on the topics that matter long term. Climate, nature, and health are those topics. They should get the priority treatment they deserve.  

(Disclosure: I worked at the World Economic Forum before joining Fortune in my current role.)

Peter Vanham
Executive Editor, Fortune
peter.vanham@fortune.com

This edition of Impact Report was edited by Holly Ojalvo.

ON OUR RADAR

As elites gather in Davos, they can’t ignore that most high-net worth individuals like me want to pay more tax (Fortune)

Nearly 250 millionaires and billionaires recently signed an open letter calling on world leaders at Davos this year to "increase taxes on wealthy people," Chuck Collins wrote in a Fortune commentary piece this week. The letter, entitled "Proud to Pay More," demands that global leaders take swift action “to tax us, the very richest in society." The letter goes on: "This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth, but it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.”