What are the greatest challenges facing the world today?
The world never has been confronted with so many complex challenges at the same
time and the role of the Annual Meeting in Davos is not just to address one of
those challenges but to provide a systemic, strategic overview about all
that's important on the global agenda and, if possible, to come up with
solutions on how we should confront as a multi-stakeholder community those
challenges. To name only some of the challenges of
course it's the economic situation, it's the great volatility which we have not
only in the capital markets but food prices, commodity prices in general and I
could go on and on our risk report which we will publish just in time for the
Annual Meeting we'll describe in detail 34 of those challenges.
What are your objectives for Davos 2011?
I think everybody will ask the question "What is the economic outlook?"
When we go again into a kind of recessionary environment,
will we finally come out of the crisis?
We have different economic policies, we have quite a number of issues related to
what we call now the period of austerity so the economic outlook will be one
major... but as expressed in our theme, we are living in a completely new reality
so we want to know what is this reality, what is different now after the crisis
and before the crisis because our assumption is that the crisis was
a structural one and many things have changed and we should not go back to the
old recipes. Number three, we want to make a strong
contribution to the G20 process. We are working together with the French presidency.
The G20 has become a major element of global governance and as it has already
been shown in Seoul, business has to be and should be integrated into this
process because the problems which we face cannot be solved by governments
alone, they need public-private partnerships, they need the support of
the business community and of civil society.
And finally, we want to show how we can address risks in a much more pro-active
and systemic way so one of the outcomes of Davos will be the creation of a
Risk Response Network bringing together all the best minds,
thinking over and dealing with risks.
What is the spirit of Davos?
First, Davos is taking place at the beginning of the year so it's a very good
moment to reflect on the future. We also have to it in the famous spirit
of Davos which means Davos is not a meeting where you have speakers and then
you have listeners. Everybody is an active participant
and here we make sure that all walks of life are involved, not only political leaders,
business leaders, but very important role of course place experts, academia,
media can contribute a lot because media are amongst those who are best informed but
we have our Young Global Leaders, we have the social entrepreneurs, we have the
religious leaders, all those form together society and if we want to solve
all the issues, we need commitment, we need an engagement of society at large
and Davos is the place to do so.