Tokyo (SCCIJ) – The World Economic Forum (WEF) is staging the first global platform of 2022 featuring heads of state and government, CEOs, and other leaders. The Davos Agenda consists of a series of State of the World sessions. Among the speakers is the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida. The WEF was scheduled to take place in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, but the event was postponed to early summer, due to the global spread of the Omicron virus variant.
The World Economic Forum takes place as a virtual summit this year (Source: WEF/flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Critical challenges
The week-long virtual agenda takes place on the World Economic Forum website and social media channels between 17-21 January. The high-ranking participants will discuss the critical challenges facing the world today and present their ideas on how to address them.
The event will also mark the launch of several WEF initiatives including efforts to accelerate the race to net-zero emissions, ensure the economic opportunity of nature-positive solutions, create cyber resilience, strengthen global value chains, build economies in fragile markets through humanitarian investing, bridge the vaccine manufacturing gap and use data solutions to prepare for the next pandemic.
“Everyone hopes that in 2022 the COVID-19 pandemic, and the crises that accompanied it, will finally begin to recede,” said Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. “But major global challenges await us, from climate change to rebuilding trust and social cohesion. To address them, leaders will need to adopt new models, look long term, renew cooperation and act systemically. The Davos Agenda 2022 is the starting point for the dialogue needed for global cooperation in 2022.”
Large speaker field
World leaders delivering “State of the World” addresses will include António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, Olaf Scholz, Federal Chancellor of Germany, Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), and others.
Ahead of the virtual meetings, the WEF released the annual Global Risks Report for 2022 which came out rather gloomy. Just 16 percent of “Davosians” from government, civil society, and commerce feel “positive” or “optimistic” about the global outlook; the rest are “worried” or “concerned”. Along with the pandemic, climate-transitions failures, extreme weather conditions, and rising social tensions were cited as top risks, particularly in the next five to 10 years. Short-term fears include health and social cleavages caused by Covid-19.
“Failure to act on climate change could shrink global GDP by one-sixth,” Zurich Insurance Group’s chief risk officer, Peter Giger, said in the WEF note accompanying the report. “The commitments taken at COP26 in Glasgow are still not enough to achieve the 1.5-degree goal.” Additionally, respondents to the survey considered “geo-economic confrontation” such as trade wars the tenth biggest general global risk now, “debt crises” sit in ninth place. More details are found in the full report here.
Text: SCCIJ mainly with material of WEF
