Davos 2025: five impact headlines you need to know
AI, natural capital, the Trump effect, this year’s G20, and the self-destruction of modern civilisation were all discussed at this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting. We dive into what Muhammad Yunus, Klaus Schwab, Steven Pinker and others were talking about in the Swiss ski resort.
In the same week as Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as US president, the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) took place in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. Around 3,000 policymakers, business people, civil society leaders, academics and others converged with the aim of addressing – according to the official description – “shared challenges and explore sustainable solutions” under the theme of “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age”.
The theme, of course, referred to the ever-increasing tide of technological development, in particular AI, which dominated many discussions. At the same time, the wider geopolitical environment, given a fresh shake-up by Trump’s re-entry to the White House, was on many delegates’ minds.
Klaus Schwab, WEF founder, opens this year’s annual meeting
The WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, remained resolutely positive throughout the event, sticking to his mantra of “constructive optimism” and believing in “our collective capacity and commitment to improve the state of the world”. The Pioneers Post team didn’t charter a private jet to the event, but we’ve been at our desks, scouring the conversations via video link, to pick out the themes that matter most to the impact community.
1. The AI paradox: it’s a hot topic, but is it a positive or negative influence?
Artificial intelligence was the topic everyone was talking about at Davos this year. As Saskia Bruysten pointed out in a Linkedin video from the event, the social and green priorities that corporates used to feature in bold letters on the shopfronts along the town’s promenade had been replaced by one theme: AI – a good indicator of where priorities lay.
AI holds transformative potential to address society’s most pressing challenges, but unlocking this requires informed, adaptable and responsible policy-making
Most of the discussion centered on AI’s transformational power and its impacts on businesses, industry and finance and in lesser measure on its potentially negative social and environmental consequences, with challenges including workforce reskilling and rocketing energy consumption. Whether the new technology will be able to solve more problems than it creates is at the core of the “AI paradox” mentioned by some speakers.
On the second day of the meeting, WEF launched a new platform, Frontier MINDS (Meaningful, Intelligent, Novel, Deployable Solutions), aiming to scale AI solutions to current global challenges, such as healthcare access, climate change, energy transition, supply chain resilience and workforce transformation.
“AI holds transformative potential to address society’s most pressing challenges, but unlocking this requires informed, adaptable and responsible policy-making,” said Cathy Li, the World Economic Forum’s head of AI, data and the metaverse. “The Frontier MINDS programme aims to provide industry leaders and policymakers with the insights needed to develop and scale AI solutions that can drive sustainable societal and economic progress while ensuring no one is left behind.”
Across the road at Social Innovation House, one of the fringe events locations, a discussion organised by Catalyst Now looked at how social entrepreneurs are using AI (or not) to tackle the challenges they’re addressing.
Dena Trujillo, CEO of Crisis Text Line, explained how AI helped scale her organisation’s work giving mental health support to young people around the world. Her organisation, which she describes as a “mental health emergency room by text and chat”, has been using AI for several years to identify which young people needed help first. She said: “We started with machine learning to triage conversations so that we could identify certain word combinations to help see who needed help first, who was more likely to be have suicidal ideation or self harm, and therefore, if there happened to be a cue or a line, they needed to be connected to a volunteer as soon as possible.”
Crisis Text Line also used AI to help train volunteers with conversation simulators. But Trujillo explained why it would be wrong to use AI in some parts of their work. “One of the most frequent questions we get asked by our texters is: are you real? They want another human on the other side of the line.”
2. Civilisation is just fine. Oh no, it’s not: Pinker and Yunus in a worldview clash
Steven Pinker’s upward-trending graphs showed a positive perspective on progress
In an upbeat presentation, Harvard professor and one of Davos’s star turns Stephen Pinker outlined humanity’s progress during the 20th and 21st centuries. He focused on the concepts of life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge and happiness. As he put it: “Things that all of us strive for for ourselves, that we can’t deny to the rest of humanity.”
With a series of upwards trending graphs, Pinker illustrated that by all of these measures, things were getting better, with just a few glitches in recent years, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even the recent conflicts in Ukraine and Middle East, and the retraction in women’s rights in Afghanistan and the US didn’t dent Pinker’s cheerful long-term perspective.
So why are things getting better? It’s because, according to Pinker, our species uses its knowledge to improve its lot. Our instinct for language means that we can share the fruits of our cognition, and we’ve created institutions that work for the greater good, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals and philanthropic organisations.
We have no escape route within the framework of this civilisation
Yet the audience who flocked to social enterprise hero, Nobel prize winner and current leader of Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus’s presentations heard a different story. “We have created the wrong civilisation,” he said. “It’s a self-destructive civilisation…We have no escape route within the framework of this civilisation.”
If humanity – and indeed all life forms – wanted to survive, the only way out was to create a new way of living. “We have to turn it around,” Yunus said. “Once we turn it around, the world becomes a very happy place.”
- Read our Pioneer Interview with Muhammad Yunus: ‘Education gives us a passenger mentality – but we are the pilots of this planet’
Yunus, however, isn’t one to dwell on the negatives. He went on to highlight how social business could be the solution that humanity needs. “In that new civilisation the concept of social business will be at the front, not at the back or in the middle.”
3. At least one South African minister ‘gets’ social innovation as the country hosts the G20 this year
South Africa has taken the reins on the G20 this year, marking the first time that the G20 has been held on the African continent. Discussions will be held by all sorts of leaders on a wide range of different topics in a series of more than 100 meetings which began in December 2024, and which will culminate in the G20 leaders’ meeting in November in Johannesburg. The themes this year are solidarity, equality and sustainability.
In an address to the World Economic Forum, South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, emphasised that he wanted the G20 to push for the world to “act together with greater urgency to halt the destruction of our planet”. He also highlighted the importance of sustainable development to create an “inclusive, just and equal world”.
However, South Africa’s minister of trade, industry and competition’s words were perhaps of more interest to the impact community. Parks Tau (pictured) emphasised that South Africa had a “well established and ingrained social and solidarity economy ecosystem” with more than 880,000 social and solidarity economy organisations. “It’s part of our DNA as a country,” he said.
Reflecting upon how the social and solidarity economy could be built into this year’s G20, Tau said he wanted policymakers to act to support what social innovators were already doing, rather than social innovators having policies imposed upon them.
He said policymakers should ensure that the “social entrepreneurship culture is supported based on the existing DNA as opposed to seeking to develop policies that try to redefine what the people are doing”.
He added: “Maybe the G20 is an opportunity for us to lead a process of changing the orientation of investors and the orientation of government to respond to what people are doing, as opposed to doing it the other way around. It’s almost a change in the way we do public policy itself.”
4. US president Donald Trump’s rhetoric is having a ripple effect
US president Donald Trump outlines his vision for America’s new ‘golden age’ via video link
Three days after his inauguration, the USA’s new president was beamed via video link into the World Economic Forum’s main hall where he was given nearly an hour to highlight his vision for America’s new “golden age”. The content of his speech held few surprises: he outlined plans for deregulation, tax cuts and boosts for manufacturing alongside a swathe of measures which will significantly set back global ambitions to stall the climate crisis, as we reported last week.
In November, Ashoka fellow Alberto Alemanno told us: “Trump’s understanding of the market is antithetical to social entrepreneurship. The marketplace is the only arena for individual – not collective – advancement and success.” He added: “The very concepts of social economy and social innovation will struggle to find some room.”
So was the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting an opportunity for those who are opposed to Trump’s perspective to gather forces and build an opposing movement? Perhaps not, it seems. Writing in Pioneers Post this week, Gosbert Chagula, co-founder of Startup Discovery School, which supports social entrepreneurs in the UK and who was in Davos last week, says: “It was noticeable that the Trump inauguration influenced the views of a sizeable cohort…It felt as though many were almost following his isolationist step, thinking about how to achieve growth, for their respective nations, for their respective companies, at all costs.”
5. Beyond carbon: natural capital and biodiversity are the new big things
While climate change and the energy transition were, as expected, high on the agenda, natural capital and biodiversity were the new focus of many conversations – a trend that we’ve observed more widely in recent months.
Speakers highlighted that the protection and regeneration of natural capital is now considered in its interconnection with climate change – and businesses are increasingly interested.
Think of nature-based solutions not just in terms of carbon – think of nature-based solutions as a way of managing water, carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity
Sherry Madera, CEO of CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), which collects data on businesses’ commitments to protecting climate and nature, said she observed that companies were “very much willing to lean in, especially when their own business is seeing the impacts of a natural world that isn't supporting their business of the future”.
Nature-based solutions (actions that use ecosystems and natural processes to solve environmental and social problems) emerged as a powerful tool, according to many speakers, to stop a “vicious circle” of biodiversity destruction, natural resources depletion and carbon emissions.
- Read our explainer: What are nature-based solutions?
Singapore president Tharman Shanmugaratnam said nature-based solutions were “a big thing”, adding that their benefits extended well beyond reducing and capturing carbon, including reducing pollution, reducing heat, improved disease management, and other social impacts.
“Think of nature-based solutions not just in terms of carbon – think of nature-based solutions as a way of managing water, carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity, because if you think of them together, the ripple effect is much larger,” he said.
There was also the question – often addressed by our community of impact investors – of how to drive investment into the protection of natural ecosystems.
Mariana Sarmiento, CEO of Terrasos, a Colombian company that develops financial structures to enable people to invest in biodiversity and ecosystems, said that while there was a lot of talk about the potential of carbon markets to mobilise finance to protect nature, businesses should think about these systems in terms of “ecological infrastructure” and find ways to mobilise finance towards the ecosystems we all depend on, just like private and public sectors mobilise capital to fund infrastructure projects.
“We underestimated how our economies are at risk because of how much stress we're putting on different ecosystems, but also how much we depend on it,” she added.
And don’t miss our other stories from Davos 2025:
Schwab Foundation reveals 2025 award winners at World Economic Forum in Davos
The Editor's Post: Carbon footprints in the snow
Reporting by Laura Joffre, Julie Pybus and David Lyons
You can watch sessions from the World Economic Forum 2025 online here.
Header photo: Muhammad Yunus speaking at the World Economic Forum 2025. Photo credit World Economic Forum / Jakob Polascsek. Other photo credits World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell and Sandra Blaser
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