The year was 2025. The place was the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos where 200 Young Global Leaders convened a Planetary Congress with the goal of “backcasting” to a more sustainable, equitable world. As ‘Keeper’ of this congress, I guided our backcasting, looking at demographic, social and technological game-changers since 2013. Thirteen ‘Guardians’… more

Tech Tuesday is an on-going series profiling the Forum’s Technology Pioneers. The Tech Pioneers are companies that have been recognized by the Forum for ground-breaking and innovative approaches in tackling some of the world’s most wicked problems. Each week we will be showcasing one of the 2013 Tech Pioneers. You can learn more about the… more

Geoffrey Lipman discusses how we are becoming more environmentally responsible tourists Someone famously said that “an elephant is a very hard thing to define, but if you see one coming down the street you know what it is”. It’s rather the same about sustainability, travel and tourism – we’ve stopped describing it and started to… more

Steven Koonin explains why our energy sector must change There are compelling reasons to improve our energy system – to make it more accessible, affordable and reliable, and to reduce its environmental impact. But energy change is often sluggish, especially as investing in energy infrastructure is expensive. A single power plant is a multi-billion dollar… more

Levi Tillemann addresses the challenges facing the electric car Electric cars are buzzing. Twice in two years, the Chevy Volt has edged out the Porsche 911 for highest customer satisfaction in Consumer Reports magazine. In 2011, the all-electric Nissan LEAF was named European Car of the Year. In 2012, the Tesla Model S was awarded… more

According to David Lawrence, biotechnology, like all technologies, is not in itself good or bad. It’s what we do with it that decides The way we human beings behave can be strange. For at least 30 years I used to give talks which included a slide showing how population increase was reducing the land available… more

The climate market has the potential to grow from US$ 10 billion to US$ 500 billion in yearly revenues within 20 years, generating 500 million additional jobs worldwide, especially in poor, rural areas for small-scale farming families. This is achievable through what I call a process of “insetting”. It is an outdated conception to believe… more

George Guo-Qiang Chen and Shrikumar Suryanarayan look to the planet’s oceans to provide the resources to produce and process the large quantities of biomass that will be needed for a sustainable future Industrial applications of biotechnology – the new “Bioeconomy” – hold out the promise of being able to produce biofuels and renewable chemicals and provide… more

Experts on the World Economic Forum’s Council on Biotechnology have selected 10 developments which they believe could help not only meet the rapidly growing demand for energy, food and healthcare, but also increase productivity and create new jobs, should issues such as regulatory certainty, public perception and investment be tackled successfully. In this blog post,… more

Michael Liebreich, Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for New Energy Architecture, explains how financial systems are biased against clean energy and clean infrastructure. Between 2004 and 2010 annual global investment in renewable energy, energy efficiency and associated technologies soared from just over US$ 50 billion to about US$ 250 billion. Clean energy… more

New challenges need new technologies to tackle them. Here, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies identifies the top 10 most promising technology trends that can help to deliver sustainable growth in decades to come as global population and material demands on the environment continue to grow rapidly. These are technologies that… more

 Peter Prove, Executive Director of the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, addresses the future role of civil society The theme of this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, “Resilient Dynamism”, seems a bit of a contradiction in terms. But that contradiction is exactly the reality for civil society today. On the one hand, civil society – in its… more