'Save the planet': As WEF returns, here is what Davos is talking about

A Business Standard analysis found that infrastructure and saving the planet are the key features of WEF going into the summit

After a hiatus of two years, the World Economic Forum is set to return to Davos this year. The annual meeting will start on Sunday, May 22 and will end on May 26. The conference comes at a time when Russia and the US are at loggerheads over the Ukraine war, and the world, especially Europe, is on tenterhooks. Moreover, the threat of Covid-19 is not over yet, as the virus has not entered the endemic stage.

While the WEF 2022 was set up as a forum to discuss global issues, the Davos summit has come under attack for ignoring issues like the environment.

A Business Standard analysis found that the meeting agenda has also undergone rapid change in the last few years. An analysis of publications by the World Economic Forum shows that 53.5 per cent of the articles/reports published by the World Economic Forum in the last one month had the title of “How to save the planet”, 20.9 per cent fell under the “infrastructure resilience" category and 9.3 per cent under the “future of economy" category.

Moreover, while the share of article/report contributions from WEF increased for the “how to save the planet” category from 46.9 per cent two years ago, for the healthy futures category, the number of articles declined from 8.5 per cent of total articles published in the last two years to 5.1 per cent over the previous one month.

The WEF has published nearly 5,811 articles in the last 24 months as per WEF Live data.

Further analysis shows that across publications from all sources—including WEF, its partners and articles/reports where WEF was mentioned—"how to save the planet" was the most covered topic by the media, with 191,651 articles written in the last two years. This category accounted for 30.1 per cent of reports. But in the previous month, its share had declined to 29.1 per cent.

The share of geopolitics and healthy futures increased as per media articles.

The stark divide between what WEF is publishing and what media perceives to be topics of concern shows the disconnect that WEF will have to address in the future.