President Cyril Ramaphosa will lead a delegation from South Africa to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 53rd annual meeting that starts in Davos, Switzerland on Monday and ends on January 20.
The theme for this year’s meeting - the WEF is an international organisation focused on public private co-operation and its annual meeting convenes government, business and civil society leaders from all over the world - is “Co-operation in a fragmented society.”
For the past 17 years the WEF’s Global Risks Report has warned about deeply interconnected global risks. The Global Risks Report 2023 released yesterday said current risks include energy and food supply crunches, which are likely to persist for the next two years, and strong increases in the cost of living and debt servicing.
These crises also risked undermining efforts to tackle longer-term risks, notably climate change, biodiversity and investment in human capital.
The report, produced in partnership with Marsh McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group and which draws on the views of over 1 200 global risk experts, policy-makers and industry leaders, said the window for action on the most serious long-term threats is closing rapidly and collective action is needed before risks reach a tipping point.
“At present, the global pandemic and war in Europe have brought energy, inflation, food and security crises back to the fore. These create follow-on risks that will dominate the next two years: the risk of recession; growing debt distress; a continued cost of living crisis; polarised societies enabled by disinformation and misinformation; a hiatus on rapid climate action; and zero-sum geo-economic warfare,” the WEF said.
“Unless the world starts to co-operate more effectively on climate mitigation and climate adaptation, over the next 10 years this will lead to continued global warming and ecological breakdown.”
Actors Idris Elba (who recently started in “The Beast”, which was filmed in South Africa, and his wife Sabrina would also be at the meeting, after the announcement Tuesday that they had been awarded the WEF’s Crystal Award for humanitarian work.
“We see the manifold political, economic and social forces creating increased fragmentation on a global and national level. To address the root causes of this erosion of trust, we need to reinforce co-operation between the government and business sectors.. At the same time there must be the recognition that economic development needs to be made more resilient, more sustainable and nobody should be left behind,” WEF executive chairman Klaus Schwab said on the WEF’s website.
More than 2 700 global leaders will be at the meeting this year. Top political leaders include: Germany’s Federal Chancelllor Olaf Scholz; European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen; European Parliament president Roberta Metsola; Korea’s president Yoon Suk-yeo, Spain prime minister Alain Berset, and a host of other country leaders including from the Republic of Congo, Morocco, Tanzania and Tunisia.
Some of the international organisation heads include from the UN, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, World Health Organization; International Energy Agency and UNICEF.
There will also be over 1 500 leaders from over 700 business organisations, including over 600 CEOs from the World Economic Forum’s member and partners.
The programme will focus on solutions and public-private cooperation to tackle issues of energy, climate and nature; investment, trade and infrastructure; frontier technologies and industry resilience; jobs, skills, social mobility and health; and geopolitical cooperation.
Last year the in-person Davos 2022 was rescheduled to May with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine high on the agenda. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a virtual address while John Kerry, US President Joe Biden’s special envoy on climate change, was there to discuss solutions to the climate crisis in person.
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