Climate clock: the Davos dilemma
As over 1,500 carbon-spewing private jets and helicopters will descend upon Davos for the 2025 World Economic Forum (WEF) during 20-24 January, empty promises of the past are forgotten and the world will once again, be injected with the newest vaccine of vain as a banal booster of delusion.
A year ago, Ursula von der Leyen, President, the European Union (EU), addressed the world’s wealthiest influencers gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, proclaiming that billions of euros would be invested in bold new technologies that could reverse the impact of climate crises. Her promises and pledges of EU cash through a ‘sovereignty’ fund for local manufacturers have since disappeared in ether. With the EU under increasing pressure of NATO, essentially abdicating its foreign policy and commonsense energy efficiencies, the domino effect has led to high inflation, energy imports and war time spending, starving any appetite for climate tech and its trillion-dollar mitigation mirage, even as millions of metric tonnes of carbon continue to clog and cloud the atmosphere with missiles and munitions.
Recent WEF Reports identified Climate Change as the top global existential threat, resonating with similar reports from UNFCCC and a number of other leading global thinktanks. The compounded risks identified by insurance companies under the Nature Action 100 Report are a combination of economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological factors. Every passing month various Climate and Ocean Conferences beckon speakers and panelists to fireside chats and keynotes that go nowhere beyond photo-ops, transient social-media buzz, magazine cover stories and more reports that waste paper and ink. Resonance in reports seems to be in dissonance when it comes to implementation. With 69 per cent of Climate Finance trickling from loans, direct inter-governmental action boils up to allocation. On a purely economic level, Climate Financing under the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCGQ) has been contested at every level bitterly at the recently inconclusive COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024.
In 2024, global carbon dioxide emissions from industry and fossil fuels breached a record high of 37.41 billion tonnes (1.08 per cent increase from 2023), without including the military and aerospace rocket and projectile launches which remain statistically secretive. A Conflict and Environment Observatory estimated military activities adding 5.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 with the US military responsible for the world's largest institutional greenhouse gas emissions. According to estimates published by the Report Climate at Crosshairs released by Transnational Institute, Washington DC, in sync with NATO’s 75th anniversary, its $1.34 trillion spending generated a staggering 233 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (tCO2e) greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating and exacerbating climate mitigation. Urge to up the ante by spending 2 per cent of GDP on military alliance compulsions would cough up even more carbon for the rest of the planet.
While the WEF clearly identifies Climate Change as an economic threat, given its direct impact owing to extreme weather events, bio-diversity loss, ecosystem collapse, critical change to air, water and land systems coupled with growing population clamoring for depleting natural resources, the litmus test lies in implementing collective sustainable solutions.
Breaking the impasse is achievable and vital to humanity. WEF has had a longstanding association with the United Nations (UN) via its Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), UN Habitat, Food and Agriculture Organization and UN-Water. With hundreds of intergovernmental agencies, think tanks, academic institutions, grassroots groups, foundations, special interest groups, NGOs, UN agencies, media manifestations and geopolitical obligations, impediments have become the norm rather than exceptions.
With 58 per cent of Swiss hotels using fossil-fuels for heating, in this age of AI and Avatars, it is time to step away from large carbon inducing global events that facilitate grandstanding, fossil-fuel aided travel, slogans, campaigns and unaffordable spending. Coalescing of mission-aligned organisations with long-term fiscal resources is a crucial first stratospheric step in re-imagining a working strategy. Dovetailing it with the percentage allocation of GDP from developed and developing nations towards technology transfers, innovations and carbon-credits could facilitate the generation of a Minimum Acceptable Recovery Configuration from Climate damage. If this level can be sustained with incremental advancements and built-in contingencies to absorb geopolitical turbulences, much can be achieved with growing public awareness and stakeholder goodwill for sustained climate action.