See data visualizations showing how the size of a country’s presence at Davos compares with its population and GDP size, based on analysis of the WEF’s participants lists for the last 8 years. Explore the charts yourself to see where your country fits.
We, like our governments, have largely come to think of recycling as having no downside. But recycling is not always the most sustainable option.
“Some participants have said that the World Resources Forum (WRF) is actually the real World Economic Forum, because here they talk about the issues that are truly important,” says Bas de Leeuw, managing director of the WRF.
Standing upright and proud, Bas de Leuw, the Managing Director of the World Resources Forum, announced at the opening session that the World Resources Forum 2015 will be carbon neutral. While offsetting CO2 emissions may be a means for compensation, for conferences organizers and participants, it’s not as easy to walk the talk.
The conference, amusingly titled Bizzz, doesn’t attract a gathering of social entrepreneurs so much as it does a circle of people; last year, only 250 attendants made up the event’s biggest crowd yet.
Ask someone at TBLI 2013 for a definition of impact investing and you’re unlikely to get the same answer. Berry Kennedy listens to another part of the long conversation defining the impact investment field. There must be “clarity between philanthropy, CSR and investing efforts. They are not all impact investments,” stressed Ximena Escobar de Nogales, head of social performance management at Bamboo Finance, an inclusive-finance private equity firm. It was a bold opinion in a presentation to a room full philanthropists and corporate representatives who consider their work to be exactly that: impact investing.
How can language barriers be eliminated from international events?
Mini-Series: Impact Istanbul features conference highlights, round-ups, interviews, Q&A’s, and speaker profiles. It is part of our International Business Forum 2013 live coverage. This time, Apolline Nassour asks: What is typical workshop on inclusive business at IBF2013 like? Definitely inclusive, but also quite fun, as learnt first hand. What makes a productive, engaging workshop at conference like the 2013 International Business Forum (IBF)?
The sense of importance in the tiny village of Davos is hard to miss. If it isn’t a throng of bodyguards escorting Henry Kissinger back to his hotel, it’s the gymnastics that must be performed to get past barriers and the Swiss police to gain access to the Congress Centre where the main action of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting is taking place. The message is clear and it is loud – if you’re not one of the chosen, you are not welcome. The Open Forum at the WEF is thus a refreshing change of pace.
Keeping true to Swiss clichés, the World Economic Forum (WEF) press meeting in Geneva last Wednesday started just as the clocks struck eleven o’clock. The rows around me were already remarkably filled with members of international media even though there were still some days to go until the Annual Meeting.
Flying. It’s convenient and quick but let’s face it – it’s a big environmental headache. And worldwide ecological conferences aren’t helping in that matter. As argued by my editor, Claudio Ruch, in the above linked article, we have to sometimes look beyond the carbon footprint to see what value we’re getting. After all, if there hadn’t been a global conference, I would still be sitting in Switzerland and Samuel Pickard in the United Kingdom, we would have never met and there would have been no extraordinary story to report.
I cannot stress the grandeur of the China National Convention Centre. It sweeps you off your feet and mops the gleaming floor with your flabbergasted face. I’ve been to smaller airport terminals and I have visited a sheikh’s palace that would fit five times over. Should the might of the late great leader ever be lost among Beijing’s smog and active lifestyle, the buildings will most definitely remind you of what you so gravely forgot. Walking past a gargantuan hallway, stumbling in and out of doors you do eventually end up in what happens to be the World Resources Forum 2012.