I was reflecting over the week-end how different the experience of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting can be...I read in the papers about what it was apparently all about and it doesn’t resonate with me at all! Why? In short, the Annual Meeting is what you make of it, it’s the choices you make about the sessions you go to, the conversations you have, the new ideas, from breakfast to well past dinner.
My Davos followed two main themes; Cybersecurity and Climate change - I chose these quite deliberately as they are the risks facing the world which are most concerning (highest impact and highest likelihood in the Global Risks Report 2019), the most interconnected with other risks and are truly without borders...requiring a global public-private partnership to mitigate them. As Davos excels at promoting dialogue between public and private sectors I wanted to contribute to debates on the biggest risks where I thought this could make the biggest difference.
On cyber security I contributed to a number of discussions, both public and private, with common themes for business including; raising awareness and preparedness, managing the triangulation of speed, cost and security are key responsibilities of Boards and management teams. Between the public and private sectors agreeing on minimum standards, data sharing and attribution protocols and how governments would support in the event of large scale events are vital steps...many of which the Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity has on its agenda for 2019 already. I used the analogy of the Apollo 11 moon landing on my panel on Thursday to illustrate that public-private partnerships can mitigate some of the biggest risks in order to achieve great advances for humanity ... achieving the seemingly impossible is actually possible.
On climate change I detected a significant shift in the discussions compared to previous years on the investor side; there was a strong push for using hard data to drive investment decisions with some great examples of institutional investors even going so far as to map companies revenue streams to their contribution to SDGs as a part of their ESG considerations. It was clear that even the central banks are starting to worry about long term consequences and looking to introduce climate related stress tests as well as disclosure of present risks.
For me Greta Thunberg stole the show with her thoughtful clarity, she didn’t mince her words, ‘Our house is on fire and we have less than 12 years to undo our mistakes...’ - we had better get on with it.
Martin's pre-conference blog can be found here.
Her round up of Day 1 can be found here.
Her round up of day 2 can be found here.