Davos 2020: Global Media Coverage

The World Economic Forum's 50th Annual Meeting celebrated stakeholder responsibility, the very notion on which the Forum was founded 50 years ago. Under the theme “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World,” nearly 3,000 participants from governments, businesses and civil society met in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, from 21-24 January 2020 to take tangible actions to address the world’s most pressing environmental, social and governance issues.

Please find on this webpage an overview of the global media and digital media coverage throughout January of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020.

The Annual Meeting serves as major milestone for the Forum’s various communities and working groups to come together to create and progress projects and initiatives. Here are some of the highlights of key impacts from the meeting:

The Forum launched the 1t.org initiative to grow, conserve and restore 1 trillion trees by the end of the decade.

The Reskilling Revolution project was launched to provide better education, skills and jobs to 1 billion people by 2030.

140 of the world’s largest companies agreed to develop a core set of common environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics.

The Forum partnered with a community of 40 central banks, international organizations, academic researchers and financial institutions to create a framework to help central banks evaluate, design and deploy Central Bank Digital Currency.

CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which was launched in Davos in 2017, announced the initiation of three programmes to develop vaccines against the novel coronavirus in partnership with Moderna and the Wellcome Trust.

The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship announced that its community had improved the lives of more than 622 million people in 190 countries since 2000.

Discover more impact here.

The main story of the Annual Meeting was climate-change action. Klaus Schwab's pre-meeting letter called on all Forum Members and Partners to tackle the urgent issue of climate change by committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or earlier.

This urgency was reflected in new data from the Global Risks Report 2020, which included climate threats as the top five risks since its first edition, and the Nature Risk Rising report, which found that $44 trillion of economic value generation is exposed to nature loss.

In global media, climate coverage included: Washington Post, Financial Times, Le Monde, CNBC, JiJi News, Asahi Globe, Times of London, Nikkei, AA, La Nacion, Guardian, Barron’s, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Coindesk, Al Jazeera and Times of India.

Highlights of climate-change action include the effort to develop common ESG goals and the announcement of the Trillion Trees initiative.

The Forum also announced the launch of UpLink, a digital crowd-engagement platform to accelerate the resolution of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Watch our explainer here and watch the session on LinkedIn.

Britain’s Prince Charles announced the launch of the Sustainable Markets Initiative and Council in collaboration with the Forum to help identify ways to rapidly decarbonize the global economy and make the transition to sustainable markets.

Marking the 50th anniversary, media coverage of the Forum's story was higher than ever before, with key interviews with Klaus Schwab in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NZZ and FAZ, and Børge Brende in NZZ am Sonntag, as well as coverage in CNN Money Switzerland. Featuring the Forum's story and impact, “Das Forum” documentary screened at the Open Forum.

There was also a focus on the sustainability of the Annual Meeting in Davos (Bloomberg, BBC, Euronews, CNBC), and on cultural leaders and Crystal Awardees, including a social media video of Crystal Awardee Jin Xing, which received more than 2 million plays on Weibo, and one of Lynette Wallworth, which received nearly a million views across all platforms.

Digital innovations for the meeting included a ‘snippet’ outlining the Forum’s work in almost every one of the 330 Davos blog posts and a version of the Forum timeline optimized for search engines.

New designs for the ‘social stories’ that appear on Instagram and Facebook and the inclusion of short clips from sessions helped generate a 50% increase in slide views to 12.5 million. We also created a YouTube mini-series of Davos ‘explainers,’ plus the ‘Davos Daily’ made in conjunction with Google and presented by five YouTube ‘creators’ invited to Davos.

The voice of youth was especially prominent at this year's Annual Meeting. Ten teenager change-makers participated in the meeting, along with 50 Global Shapers and more than 60 Young Global Leaders.

There were more than 32,000 mentions of the teenage change-makers in international media, including influential coverage in the New York Times, BBC and Deutsche Welle. Learn more about them here.

Highlights from youth impact include:

Greta Thunberg, the teenage organizer of #FridaysforFuture school strikes, called on countries to reduce emissions. (Watch her address here.)

Global Shapers committed to supporting the Reskilling Revolution and Trillion Trees initiatives and launched a pilot programme in 15 cities to provide peer-to-peer support on mental health.

Explore the media coverage, themes, audience breakdown and participants.