Greetings, Davos delegates and WEF watchers!
It’s the final day of the 2024 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, and the ending here is always a bit of a sad affair. Up and down the Promenade, the pop-up cafes and chalets that serve as temporary corporate headquarters in the Alps will get broken down, the parts and furniture loaded on trucks to be stored away for next year. It always has the feel of the circus leaving town.
There is still a morning’s worth of programming, however, including a panel moderated by yours truly.
The CEOs of Weights & Biases, e&, and Rescale, along with Slovenia’s minister of digital transformation join me in the Salon room at the Congress Centre for a 10:15 am CET talk about what’s underpinning AI infrastructure, and whether it will do anything to promote global competitiveness and/or inclusion. We’re going head to head with Jane Goodall, who’s over in Aula speaking about “Earth’s Wisdom Keepers.” No hard feelings if you choose that one; the woman is an absolute legend.
Elsewhere on the schedule, Alexander Soros takes part in a 9 am panel in the Ignite room, discussing the wave of elections coming in 2024 (session title: “4.2 Billion People at the Ballot Box”). Also at 9 am., Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, Nature editor in chief Magdalena Skipper, Blade Nzimande from South Africa’s ministry of higher education, science, and innovation, and his German counterpart, Bettina Stark-Watzsinger, will be in Aspen 1 for a session on rebuilding trust in science.
At 11 am, get the final word on the global economic outlook, at least from Davos, with an all-star lineup including European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, World Trade Organization director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Carlyle co-chairman David Rubenstein, Singapore’s president, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, and finance ministers Mohammed Al-Jadaan of Saudi Arabia and Christian Lindner of Germany.
The 1 pm farewell lunch (registration required) up at the Schatzalp will be a scenic place to contemplate their forecasts.
What makes a good WEF panel
The WEF used to be famous (at least among journalists) for convening panels of people in extremely important positions to discuss nebulous topics about which they said very little of substance. That all seemed to change after covid-19 and the invasion of Ukraine. Suddenly, the questions put to the speakers felt comparatively defined and urgent.
Among the leading examples of this at the 2024 meeting: a Tuesday session titled “When Climate Impacts Health.” What made the panel so satisfying? Let’s break it down.
🤓 It had a strong lineup, with people bringing a diverse array of backgrounds and areas of expertise to a topic of shared interest. To wit, this one brought together:
- Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer
- Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine
- Vanessa Kerry, co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health, a critical care physician, and the WHO’s special envoy for climate change and health
- Nisia Trindade Lima, Brazil’s minister of health
- Cheryl Moore, chief research programmes officer at the Wellcome Trust, and the moderator for the session
🔍 It offered highly specific examples of the problems under discussion and the potential solutions at hand.
- The Brazilian health minister rattled off a long list of ways in which climate affects health, including waterborne and mosquito-borne diseases that come with flooding and extreme rainfall; malnutrition that can come with drought; the overburden on public health infrastructure during climate-induced health crisis; the damage to those facilities from extreme weather; and the mental health impact of physical stressors tied to climate change.
- The Bayer CEO was similarly detailed when he talked about responses to the problems. Among the initiatives underway at Bayer, the ag and pharma giant has developed so-called small-stature corn, which grows to 6 ft tall instead of the more typical 10 ft tall. The shorter stalks are less likely to blow over when weather gets severe. They also allow farmers to check for pests before spraying with pesticides. (Farmers typically can’t get their spraying equipment into the fields without damaging the crop once the stalks grow beyond 6 ft, so even without evidence of pests, they usually spray when the corn reaches 6 ft high so that they don’t risk losing their crops just before the harvest.)
🎁 It offered a memorable takeaway. This one came from Seed Global Health’s Kerry, who summed up the climate-health connection succinctly: “We always talk in degrees Celsius,” she said. “A colleague of mine always says we should not be talking in degrees Celsius, but in lives saved.”
Seen and heard
We told you yesterday would be a big day both for AI talk from Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and for Will.i.am sightings, but we didn’t know how right we would be. The surprise guest at the annual Salesforce lunch in The Dome? Sam Altman. The OpenAI chief offered an inspiring vision for our AI future. But his was challenged a few minutes later by usually tech-forward Will.i.am, who had a sobering take on the Davos set’s enthusiasm for investing right now in machines. Check out Quartz’s coverage of their two very different glimpses at life with AI.
The Salesforce extravaganza picked back up in the evening, with what is probably the hottest ticket all week for any nightcap on the Promenade. Revelers were treated to a nice, long set (for a corporate gig) by a musician perfectly picked for the Gen-X-heavy crowd.
Readers, the very first newsletter we sent you this week asked you to notify us of any Sting sightings. Now, your faithful correspondent can say she had one herself.
With that, I bid you so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye—and invite you to follow more Quartz coverage by signing up for the Quartz Daily Brief, downloading the Quartz Obsession podcast, and keeping a lookout for our next Need to Know pop-up newsletter.
Safe travels and best wishes for a productive 2024,
Heather