Climate Action

Constructive optimism: 3 surprising projects that came out of Davos 2025

Impressions from the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland 24 January 2025. Copyright:  World Economic Forum/Pascal Bitz

Many initiatives are launched at the Annual Meeting, but not all are what you might expect from a large business event. Image: World Economic Forum

Elizabeth Mills
Writer, Forum Stories
This article is part of: World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
  • The Annual Meeting offers an ideal opportunity to launch initiatives, and many are given voice at the event.
  • But not every initiative is what you might expect from the World Economic Forum.
  • What these initiatives provide is some indication of the wide-ranging nature of the Forum's work and the activities that take place year-round.

Bring leading public figures, top businesspeople, civil society leaders, high-flying academics, and even a world-class footballer together in an Alpine ski resort and what do you get? Not the makings of a terrible joke but as this year’s Annual Meeting has revealed, constructive optimism and some tangible impact.

Many projects have emerged from the event, but there are three that are a little bit different and perhaps not what readers might expect. They include the establishment of the Earth’s largest-protected tropical forest reserve, a boost to the supply of critical minerals, and large-scale jobs creation.

Protecting Earth's largest lung

The Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and partners took the opportunity to use Davos’ global platform to announce the creation of the Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor. This tropical nature reserve will ultimately be both the size of France, and the largest protected community reserve on earth.

This unique resource is home to 10,000 species of birds, one-third of which are not found anywhere else in the world. It sustains the livelihoods of 60 million people. An area of the size of Iceland remains undisturbed, creating valuable, irreplaceable biomes. It sequesters 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually, and has a peat swamp that stores 29 billion tons of carbon – this is equivalent to approximately three years’ worth of global greenhouse gas emissions. In a word, it is amazing.

But it is under threat, which is why it’s critical that action is taken. Among the threats it faces are clearing for monocrop plantations and industrial meat farming, illegal logging and the trafficking of its other resources (including charcoal), conflict, and the wider effects of climate change.

Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Gim Huay Neo, Managing Director, World Economic Forum; John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (2021-2024), US Department of State, USA; speaking in Defending Earth's Last Lung session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 22/1/2025, 15:00 – 15:30 at Congress Centre - Ignite. Issue Briefing. Copyright: World Economic Forum / Jason Alden
Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo announcing the creation of the Kivu-Kinshasa corridor with Gim Huay Neo, Managing Director at the World Economic Forum, and Jozef Sikela, EC Commissioner for International Partnerships. Image: World Economic Forum

Its new status will help mitigate some of these threats, with the authorities keen to develop an economic model rooted in sustainability to stimulate green economic activity. The government is seeking to emulate the Virunga Alliance model, which is based on the successes of UNESCO World Heritage site, Virunga National Park. The park has suffered, particularly at the hands of armed rebels, but where the Congolese government retains control, it has started building an alternative clean economy, providing new opportunities for local communities and undermining armed groups’ attempts to prosper from trafficking natural resources. In the past five years, 21,000 jobs have been created, and research suggests that this model could generate $1 billion in revenues annually.

The idea is to emulate this model throughout DRC’s Congo Basin. To this end, DRC’s parliament has passed enabling legislation and begun the work of protecting tracts of land in partnership with local communities, with the aim of conserving and restoring this tropical reserve using green economic development. It needs help, however, and is calling on partners to support the development of renewable energy generation sustainable agriculture, sustainable logistics, and high-quality carbon credits.

Securing critical minerals

Critical minerals are the Achilles’ heel of the green energy transition. They include the likes of cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel and rare earth elements, all of which are integral to clean energy technologies, like electric vehicles, as well as technologies like mobile phones. A supply crunch is in the offing. If we are to get to net zero by 2050, the annual demand for these minerals must more than triple. To put this into context, to provide the minerals required for batteries alone, 300 new mines are required in the next decade.

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Cognisant of this, a Forum team announced at the Annual Meeting that it was bringing its Future of Minerals Forum together with its Securing Minerals for the Energy Transition (SMET) initiative to boost collaboration in shaping the value chains of critical minerals. This not simply a case of boosting supply, but ensuring that this is achieved in a sustainable and just manner.

Preparing for the future of work

The nature and skills required for jobs changes continuously, but the growing use of frontier technologies is altering job types far more swiftly. Reskilling and upskilling have become bywords for dealing with these rapid changes, with policy-makers swiftly appreciating that focus must be given to the transformation of education and the world of work.

With this in mind, the Forum launched the Reskilling Revolution. Now in its fifth year and operating in 40 countries, it brings together business, civil society and government with the aim of creating solutions that accelerate reskilling and upskilling, and create a stronger sense of inclusion within the workforce. These solutions are shared, and where possible, replicated and/or scaled up.

The aim is to support one billion individuals by 2030, giving them the skills that will allow them to thrive in the changing workplace. As part of this initiative, the Forum announced an accelerator programme for Indonesia at the Annual Meeting, which will focus on one of five areas: education, gender parity, jobs, markets of tomorrow and skills. This is vital for the country’s large labour market, where there are notable skills gaps, particularly in digital literacy.

See more on reasons to be hopeful from the Annual Meeting 2025:

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Collaboration for Earth’s largest tropical forest reserve

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