Blog and opinion
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Paradigm shifts and pristine coral reefs: Everything to know about the environment this week
Friday 21st of January 2022
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to business leaders on Monday to support developing countries “in their hour of need” with access to COVID-19 vaccines, help to combat the climate crisis and reform of the global financial system. Speaking virtually to the World Economic Forum, Guterres said: “Across all three of these areas, we need the support, the ideas, the financing and the voice of the global business community.”
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Davos Agenda: What can we expect of 2022? Highlights and key takeaways
Friday 21st of January 2022
The year 2022 started with a note of uncertainty. The Omicron COVID-19 variant was spreading the globe, the risks of climate crisis loomed nearer, economic recovery and development seemed to stall, and the gap between the rich and the poor stretched even wider.
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How does Earth look from space? ‘Like one big spaceship’ – astronaut Matthias Maurer on Radio Davos
Friday 21st of January 2022
What’s it like to be in space? And what do astronauts do as they whizz around the world every 90 minutes in the International Space Station?
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3 areas of progress on climate change can help combat anxiety
Friday 21st of January 2022
The last year of my life has been full of scary and challenging moments (I mean, who can’t relate?), but for me there’s one bizarre experience that stands above the rest. I came home from the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow so excited to hit the ground running when I landed in British Columbia. Instead, I stepped off the plane just as lakes were breaching farmland and mountainsides were spewing mud across highways.
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Here’s what’s needed to build a circular economy
Friday 21st of January 2022
Nearly half of all global emissions come from how we make and use things. To tackle climate goals, we need to take a fresh look at how we approach our goods and services.
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World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022 rescheduled to 22-26 May
Friday 21st of January 2022
The World Economic Forum is pleased to announce that it will hold its Annual Meeting 2022 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, from Sunday 22 to Thursday 26 May. Under the theme, Working Together, Restoring Trust, the Annual Meeting 2022 will be the first global in-person leadership event since the start of the pandemic.
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‘Businesses are more trusted than governments’. Here’s how the private sector is stepping up
Friday 21st of January 2022
Trust is a topic that has emerged in sessions across the virtual Davos Agenda this week, as world leaders, the business community and civil society convened to address the State of the World.
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7 new species discovered in 2021
Friday 21st of January 2022
With the surface of the earth coming in at over 510 million square kilometres, it is little wonder there is still more to discover. Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences last year recorded 70 new plant and animal species.
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Some vaccines last a lifetime – so why do we need COVID-19 boosters?
Friday 21st of January 2022
Why is it that some vaccines you only need once, but for others you need to get boosters?
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Men and women perceive internal body signals differently. Here’s what it means for their mental health
Friday 21st of January 2022
Most people are familiar with the five senses (touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste), but not everyone knows that we have an additional sense called interoception. This is the sense of our body’s internal state. It helps us feel and interpret internal signals that regulate vital functions in our body, like hunger, thirst, body temperature and heart rate.
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Doomscrolling: How can we manage the growing addiction to negative news?
Friday 21st of January 2022
“Doomscrolling,” a term used to describe the concept of binging on negative news, is a new and unique behavior, and not just another trendy, clickbaity phrase, a new study finds.
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How can leaders succeed in the clean energy transition?
Friday 21st of January 2022
Limiting climate change will require an unprecedented global movement to make low-carbon technologies the norm. COP26 – the UN climate conference held last November in Glasgow – showed that unfortunately, the world is far from ready for such a movement. Many leaders still assume that reducing emissions and growing their countries’ economies aren’t compatible goals.
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Which are the world’s top 5 supercomputers?
Friday 21st of January 2022
A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel.
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We now know a major cause of multiple sclerosis. Can we eradicate it?
Friday 21st of January 2022
Several chronic or life-threatening diseases have their origin in a common viral or bacterial infection. Approximately two-thirds of the world population is infected with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which significantly increases the risk of developing gastric cancer. Similarly, high-risk types of human papillomavirus cause nearly all of cervical cancers. A recent large-scale study has now shown for the first time that Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) might be the main cause of multiple sclerosis. It is one of the most common human viruses: About 90% of people worldwide will be infected during their lifetime, generally causing few, if any, symptoms.
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COVID-19: What you need to know about the coronavirus pandemic on 21 January
Friday 21st of January 2022
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 342.7 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths has now passed 5.57 million. More than 9.79 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.
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Can you trust your AI assistant? A worker’s guide to predictions, decisions and collaboration
Friday 21st of January 2022
In a busy hospital, a radiologist is using an artificial intelligence system to help her diagnose medical conditions based on patients’ X-ray images. Using the AI system can help her make faster diagnoses, but how does she know when to trust the AI’s predictions?
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Antimicrobial resistance now causes more deaths than HIV/AIDS and malaria worldwide – new study
Friday 21st of January 2022
Antimicrobial resistance is spreading rapidly worldwide, and has even been likened to the next pandemic – one that many people may not even be aware is happening. A recent paper, published in Lancet, has revealed that antimicrobial resistant infections caused 1.27 millions deaths and were associated with 4.95 million deaths in 2019. This is greater than the number of people who died from HIV/AIDS and malaria that year combined.
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A growing share of Americans say affordable housing is a major problem where they live
Friday 21st of January 2022
Prospective homebuyers and renters across the United States have seen prices surge and supply plummet during the coronavirus pandemic. Amid these circumstances, about half of Americans (49%) say the availability of affordable housing in their local community is a major problem, up 10 percentage points from early 2018, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2021.
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How can Asia achieve a clean energy transition? Examples from 5 countries
Friday 21st of January 2022
Nowhere in the world is as critical for the clean energy transition as Asia, which accounts for almost half of global energy demand and is today the world’s highest emitting region, overtaking historical heavy emitters in North America and Europe. Despite economic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries in the Asia-Pacific region continued to witness record-breaking growth in renewables since 2020.
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Monarch butterflies: can ‘assisted migration’ save this important species?
Friday 21st of January 2022
For several weeks in 2015, the sound of chainsaws cutting down trees was incessant in the Angangueo municipality in the Mexican state of Michoacán. When a group of people tried to stop the deforestation, it was already too late: 10 hectares (25 acres) of forest had already been destroyed on hillsides in the central area of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.
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What hydrogen and the global energy transition mean for industry in 2022
Friday 21st of January 2022
“Water is the coal of the future.” That’s how French author Jules Verne summed it up nearly 150 years ago. “The elements hydrogen and oxygen, decomposed by electric current, will in the future supply the Earth’s energy,” he went on to say.
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How to accelerate the net-zero transition in transport
Friday 21st of January 2022
The role of transport was front and center at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland. Leaders from nations, cities, international organizations, NGOs – and notably the private sector – zeroed in on the role of transport as one of three critical sources of carbon emissions as well as the only sector still increasing in its greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint. In 2020, the global transport industry was responsible for approximately 7.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
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Driving a global effort against Alzheimer’s
Friday 21st of January 2022
The Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative (DAC), launched at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda 2021, is a leading global initiative to accelerate progress on the discovery, testing and delivery of precision interventions for Alzheimer’s disease.
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5 ways the circular economy will transform your fashion habits
Friday 21st of January 2022
Chile shocked the world with images of its Atacama desert this past November. This landscape, one of the most remote spots in the world, is historically known for majestic volcanoes and salt flats. In these new images, however, those landscapes were transformed by 59,000 tons of clothes (worn and unworn) that had formed mountains atop the desert plateaus.
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3 ways to reinvent affordable housing in a post-pandemic world
Thursday 20th of January 2022
When more than 90 countries issued stay-at-home orders during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 1 billion people across the globe sheltered in slums and informal settlements. Yet, these necessary public health measures offer scant defence against this potentially deadly virus if housing conditions are unsafe. The urgency of the pandemic response spotlighted an inescapable truth: chronic lack of safe and affordable housing in both advanced economies and developing nations is one of the biggest drivers of health and wealth disparities in our world.