Radio Davos is a podcast that is as wide-ranging and thought-provoking as the work of the World Economic Forum itself. Rather than being restricted to any one topic, each week it focuses on a particular issue of global importance, such as macro-economics, the environment, technology, health, social inequalities and much more - always seeking solutions to the big problems.
On this episode we listen back to a selection of episodes from 2023.
The World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2024:
Global Risks Report 2023: https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2023/
The Future of Jobs Report 2023: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/
AI Governance Alliance: https://initiatives.weforum.org/ai-governance-alliance/home
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023: https://www.weforum.org/publications/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2023/
Global Gender Gap Report 2023: https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-gender-gap-report-2023/
related podcast episode:
Global Coalition for Value in Healthcare https://initiatives.weforum.org/global-coalition-for-value-in-healthcare/home
Centre for Nature and Climate https://centres.weforum.org/centre-nature-and-climate/home
Check out all our podcasts on wef.ch/podcasts:
Join the World Economic Forum Podcast Club
Podcast transcript
This transcript has been generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio.
Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them.
This week, we’re looking back on the year and listening back to some of our best moments on a podcast that doesn’t have a single theme, but looks at a range of big issues from the environment to technology, from the economy to health - and more.
So let’s go back to the start of 2023.
January is when the World Economic Forum holds its Annual Meeting in the Swiss mountain town of Davos.
If you’ve never been to a Davos meeting, and want to get a feel for what it’s like ahead of the next one, you could do worse than listen back to the daily Radio Davos shows.
This is the opening montage from Day 5 - which gives you an idea of the breadth of issues discussed - such as macro economics, with the head of the European Central Bank, and the rising importance of artificial intelligence. Each daily episode was co-hosted with leading podcasters, and we’ll hear a little from my cohosts on Day 5 - British journalists Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel.
And you'll also hear some improptu music which starts off the show:
Robin Pomeroy: It's Friday, the 20th of January, and from the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting, 2023, this is Radio Davos.
Angelique Kidjo: [singing]
Robin Pomeroy: Singer Angelique Kidjo and cellist Yo-Yo Ma struck up an impromptu performance just outside the Radio Davos studio. It kept us from recording any interviews for a while - but not for long.
On this episode, European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde insists inflation will come back under control.
Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank: Inflation, by all accounts, however you look at it, is way too high. And our determination at the ECB is to bring it back to 2%.
Robin Pomeroy: In the Radio Davos booth, Vilas Dhar, an expert on the impact that Artificial Intelligence will have on us all, says the human touch will always be important.
Vilas Dhar, President, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation: AI is getting closer and closer to replicating some of those fundamental human experiences: poetry, music, art. And yet the human element of it matters so much more for the quality of the product and AI gives you.
Robin Pomeroy: And Prajakta Koli, a social media influencer from India, reflects on her first time in Davos.
Prajakta Koli, Influencer & UNDP affiliate: It's been a lot, honestly. I had heard so much about this place, but being here is a whole different experience. Valuable, impactful conversations are happening. What I want to do is kind of learn, pick up on things, get fresh perspective, meet other young people, collaborate maybe, and take that back home and see how I can put that to use in my socials.
Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.
Welcome to Davos and welcome to Davos to my co-hosts for today, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel. Hi, Emily.
Emily Maitlis, Journalist & Host, The News Agents: Hi Robin.
Robin Pomeroy: Hi Jon.
Jon Sopel, Journalist & Host, The News Agents: Hello. Hello. Lovely to be with you.
Robin Pomeroy: So happy to have you here. Big fan of your podcast, The News Agents, If anyone’s not heard it, which one of you is going to tell us what it is?
Emily Maitlis: I think we've come from a world in which there were stories that we felt we had to do, you know, in block capitals. And now editorially, we come to the meeting with our producers and editors and just say: what is interesting?
Robin Pomeroy: Emily Maitlis, who was one of my co-hosts on Radio Davos during the 2023 Annual Meeting - you can listen back on the whole week - the daily episodes are still available wherever you listen to podcasts.
As I record this, we are gearing up for the next Annual Meeting, from the 15th to the 19th January 2024. Just ahead of that, the World Economic Forum will publish its annual Global Risks Report, an important survey of what are seen as the biggest risks in the short and long terms.
Back in January, as you heard in that last clip, inflation was a seen as a big risk to economies across the world, but the Risks Report identified so many and varied risks that we were increasingly hearing this new word - polycrisis.
Here’s a clip from our episode from back then, with Peter Giger, Group Chief Risk Officer at Zurich Insurance, speaking with my colleague Gayle Markovitz:
Gayle Markovitz, Radio Davos: Do you think we are we are in a new era of volatility and cascading crises. And can you explain what you mean by polycrisis?
Peter Giger, Group Chief Risk Officer at Zurich Insurance: First of all, it seems to be the time where we invent a word for everything we haven't seen. And maybe the perception is a bit flawed because more likely we're coming out of an era of almost unnatural stability that we saw for maybe 15, 20 years. Because if you look at human history, what we experience today seems not so out of the norm when basically stability is something that was not observed in history for very long periods of time.
Having said that, we've built a world that that produced a lot of wealth for a lot of people through connecting, through trade, through openness, and now all of a sudden we realise that the foundation for all of that wasn't strong enough to really secure the benefits that we thought we had. And we are confronted with the fact that we may lose some of the benefits that globalisation has produced over the last 20 years.
I think, yes, the era that we've gone through was quite stable. I think the outlook is probably less stable. And every generation thinks they're experiencing the worst headwinds in history. I think that's also very human. But then at the end of the day, what it takes is trust into the future. I mean, in the dark ages, people built churches over generations. How have they done that? And why can we that we think are culturally so advanced, not come together in a project that takes us 25 years? So that's just a generation. We're not talking 50 or 100 years.
Robin Pomeroy: Peter Giger, Group Chief Risk Officer at Zurich Insurance which, along with the consultancy Marsh, collaborates with the World Economic Forum to create the Global Risks Report. Look out for a Radio Davos episode on that ahead of the Annual Meeting 2024
Jobs now - and another major report from the Forum - the Future of Jobs Report.
In an episode from May, I spoke to Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of online learning company Coursera, about the huge disruption that artificial intelligence was likely to bring to the world of work. Before that, my colleague Gayle Markovitz, again, asked Forum Managing Director Saadia Zahidi about the headline findings of the Future of Jobs Report:
Gayle Markovitz: We're faced with some fundamental changes to the jobs market, the impact of COVID, the green transition, the rise of AI, macroeconomic uncertainty. How would you characterise this moment in time and what's the expected impact on labour markets?
Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director, World Economic Forum: So I think you said the word: uncertainty. That is really key here.
When it comes to some of those macro trends. There are some very positive ones. So it's clear that the investments in the green transition will be very positive for jobs. It's clear that ESG standards and their widespread application across different companies and industries is again likely to add to a growth in jobs.
These are likely to be positive trends. At the same time, there is a potential risk of a prolonged economic downturn. There continues to be high inflation that impacts input costs, but also impacts the purchasing power of consumers. And so those are likely to be trends that will negatively end up impacting jobs.
And then when it comes to the subject of the day, which is really technological change and how fast companies are adopting technologies, I think that's where the picture is a bit more mixed. For about half of companies, they expect the outlook for jobs to be very positive, but a quarter of companies expect the outlook for jobs to be quite negative.
Now, that's a combination. It really depends very much on very specific technologies, but it's not quite as positive as the green transition and not quite as negative as some of the economic trends we see.
Robin Pomeroy: The report shows a huge amount of disruption over the next few years. It forecasts 44% of workers skills will be disrupted during that period. I mean, what's your reaction to that and what do you think people reading that should take away from it?
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO, Coursera: It might be underestimating the actual impact. I mean, I personally, starting in early December, started using ChatGPT. I saw that the step change from ChatGPT 3.5, which is what they announced and offered in December, and now they're on 4.0. And I'll tell you this, this technology, this generative language technology basically is a chat bot and you can ask it questions and it gives you answers.
And I'm finding the acuity, the coherence, the linguistic fluency of this technology to be absolutely stunning. And I'm an English major. You know, I got an English degree and a quantitative economics degree, and I have an MBA, and I find this technology to be an incredible thought partner that is changing the way I do my job every day. So I don't think there's any job that's not going to be impacted by some form of technology in the next 3 to 5 years.
Robin Pomeroy: It's astonishing, isn't it? You can't think of any job that won't be impacted.
Jeff Maggioncalda: And part of what it is is if you look at the traditional kind of AI, and this is still out there, the things that are automating tasks that have been typically manual sort of repetitive tasks and predictable tasks, those were typically thought to put jobs at risk that are held by lower wage folks who have less formal education. Those are still at risk, by the way, kind of manufacturing automation, robotics, things like that.
But now with this new type of AI, this ChatGPT-style, generative AI, it is automating cognitive tasks. And there was a big report that just came out on March 27th from OpenAI and University of Pennsylvania that showed that those jobs most at risk or exposed to this new technology are jobs held by people with college degrees.
So now we're pretty much all in the same boat here, whether you are a factory worker or on the front lines or whether you're a knowledge worker sitting behind a desk, technology is shifting the way almost every job task will be performed.
I think the ones that are estimated to not have a big impact are like stone workers, slaughterhouses, certain nurses and care aides. I mean, things where you physically have to be touching things in a non repetitive way. But really there's a very, very wide range of jobs that will be redefined by this technology.
Robin Pomeroy: Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, and before him, Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, speaking on an episode called The rise of AI and the green transition will transform the way we work, about the Future of Jobs Report 2023 - do go back and listen to the whole thing on your Radio Davos feed.
Talking of AI, it was everywhere in 2023, following the release of ChatGPT a few weeks before the start of the year. The World Economic Forum convened two summits on the governance of artificial intelligence and created the AI Governance Alliance. Here on Radio Davos, we did a five-part series on generative AI, speaking to experts in the industry, academia and in policymaking.
In this first episode of that mini-series, I asked Pascale Fung, Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, what she saw as the most promising applications of generative AI:
Pascale Fung: I would like to see that we can come up with solutions where we can actually take advantage or control generative AI.
Today, these large language models there are like these powerful wild beasts, right? We need to have algorithms and methods to tame such beasts and then to use them for the benefit of humanity.
So in the long term, I hope to see more beneficial AI in the medical domain, for example. Healthcare for elderly, healthcare for disadvantaged people who have no access to advanced medical care, that we can democratise such health care with AI technology.
Robin Pomeroy: Is there a risk that AI development is moving too fast now?
Pascale Fung: The risk is already here. We have already seen people who are using generative AI in a way that it's not intended to be used.
When we say AI development, maybe we should differentiate between upstream AI research and downstream AI deployment. So I think today, I am very encouraged to see the progress we have been making in upstream AI research, including coming up with ways to mitigate harm in AI.
Now, I am worried that the deployment is going too fast because we're deploying systems that we don't understand 100% the ramification of. We don't necessarily have to explain the AI system that we deploy in minute detail to everybody who's going to use it. But we need to have the confidence that we can mitigate the harm before we release the system into the wild. So this is what I worry about.
Robin Pomeroy: Professor Pascale Fung on the first episode of our mini-series on generative AI which was called: Why everyone's talking about the promise and risks of this 'powerful wild beast'.
Artificial intelligence wasn’t the only technology that caught our attention in 2023. In July we published an episode called Beyond AI: the top-10 tech of 2023 set to change our lives, looking at the Forum’s annual report highlighting the Top 10 Emerging Technologies that will change our lives in the next 3-5 years.
Out of that list, the idea that we can attach sensors to plants and actually find out how they are doing, was just irresistible to me. I asked Mariette DiChristina, Dean and Professor of Journalism at Boston University College of Communication, to tell us more:
Robin Pomeroy: I had no idea this is possible. Mariette, tell us about wearable plant sensors.
Mariette DiChristina: It is amazing technology.
The UN has said that by 2050 we'll need to increase food production by 70% to feed the world's population. At the same time, we're struggling with various issues around climate and how different growing conditions are changing. We also, a little earlier today, talked about systems in the body and how in the past we might have been able to take a picture or a series of pictures, but being able to look steadily provides us with revelations on what's actually going on at the ground.
In the same way, we can do this in a human body, we could do this for plants, with wearable plant sensors. The idea is you get a non-invasive sensor that can monitor resistance in the plant and by doing so and tell folks who are watching it, does it have adequate nutrition, how is its water supply and is it getting enough sun. And the difference here is going from being able to take very low-quality satellite pictures of a field down to exactly what's happening, one plant to the next. This will enable us to help feed the world.
Robin Pomeroy: When you say resistance, you mean electrical resistance. I had no idea that there was any kind of electrical signals passing through a plant. But, in fact, that is what this is measuring, right?
Mariette DiChristina: All of our cells, our cells, the plant cells, anything alive, uses teeny tiny electrical signals to communicate and transmit information. We are, I suppose, different in some ways, in many ways, from electronics, but we do contain our own little voltages going on in our bodies, and the plants do, too.
By measuring those electrical changes in the plant, the sensors will be able to give a lot of precision to what's going on in the field.
Robin Pomeroy: Mariette DiChristina who, along with Bernie Meyerson, Chief Innovation Officer Emeritus at IBM, draws up the top 10 tech list. By the way, you can watch as well as listen back to that episode - find it on the World Economic Forum's YouTube channel.
The top-10 tech report has been going since 2011, identifying little-known technologies that then, it was supposed, would go on to have a huge societal impact.
One technology highlighted in one of those reports was something called genomic vaccines or mRNA vaccines - a promising idea at the time, it went on to underpin the majority of vaccines created to defeat the COVID pandemic.
And the question of how we might prepare for the next pandemic was the subject of a Radio Davos episode in July. I spoke to the author of Disease X, a book that looks at the lessons we can learn from COVID and other novel disease outbreaks. Here’s author Kate Kelland:
Kate Kelland, author, 'Disease X': Of course, COVID-19 was a disease X before it got its own name. You're right, it was a novel disease. We had never seen it in humans before. But the truth is it came from a family of viruses and that family of viruses included Sars, the original Sars, Mers, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in 2012 and also includes a number of viruses that cause the common cold.
So you're right that we'd never seen this particular virus before, but we knew a lot of its family members. We therefore actually had gained quite a lot of knowledge about the sorts of characteristics that that virus had.
And specifically, what we did was, because scientists were working for decades or more on Sars vaccines and also on Mers vaccine, they found out some very key pieces of information about coronaviruses, one of them being that the spike protein is an extremely important aspect of the virus and if you can stabilise it, it becomes a very useful vaccine target.
So in fact what we had done before COVID emerged was we'd actually done quite a lot of work on finding out about a virus that didn't exist yet.
And so essentially what this book is saying is that if we do that kind of homework on every one of the 25 or so viral families that we already know have the potential to cause disease in humans - so each one of those families has already produced a virus that can can jump into humans and has jumped into humans - then we can actually gain a lot of knowledge ahead of time about something that doesn't exist yet.
It sounds bizarre, but the proof is in the pudding, in terms of that's what we did with COVID.
And it's also, as it happens, the situation that we were in with monkey pox. We already knew an awful lot about that virus and we actually already had a vaccine that worked because it came from the same family as smallpox, camel pox, all sorts of other viruses, and they share common traits.
So scientifically, it's about doing that basic research and the vaccinology work. And actually you can get a long way towards being able to produce something that will target a novel virus before that virus even emerges.
Robin Pomeroy: It's quite reassuring, again to a non-scientist, to hear 25 families, because I'm just reading in the book here, scientists estimate there are around 100 million types of viruses on Earth. It's just baffling the enormity and how minuscule these things are. If we're able, though, to get a grasp on those 25 families and put us that many steps ahead, it should be very reassuring.
So what's the bad side then? What's standing in our way of doing that?
Kate Kelland: One of the bad sides is, there are 25 families, but the coronavirus family itself, for example, has already given us Sars, Mers, COVID, you know, pretty bad.
We're not talking about 25 viral threats. We're talking about 250 to 300 viral threats. It is a big number, but it is finite. So so it's not this kind of unfathomable amount of work. It is a vast amount of work, but it does have an end point and it is doable.
Robin Pomeroy: Kate Kelland on an episode of Radio Davos called: Disease X - how the world can stop the next pandemic.
Staying on health, in April, I spoke to filmmaker Shannon Cohn about her documentary Below the Belt - about endometriosis, a painful, sometimes excruciating, condition that affects countless women around the world, but which usually goes undiagnosed and untreated. I asked Shanon to tell us about the disease:
Shannon Cohn, director, 'Below the Belt': Below the Belt is a feature documentary that looks at - goodness - so many things in women's health, like gender bias in medicine, racial bias in medicine, the menstrual taboo that as society around the world we have in varying degrees, and impact on women, financial barriers to care - all of the larger systemic health care issues that all people grapple with, but through the lens of a single condition called endometriosis.
And I know at this point maybe I should say what endometriosis is...
Robin Pomeroy: Before you do that I'm going to play a clip from the film. This is - we're going to hear several voices of women talking about it and you'll hear what their experience is with endometriosis.
Below the Belt movie clip, various women: One out of every ten women. Okay? 170 million women suffer from it.
Well, those of you who don't know endometriosis is I'm going to read the definition straight from the internet: endometriosis is the abnormal growth of cells similar to those that form inside of the uterus, but in a location outside of the uterus.
It's literally internal bleeding and it causes so much pain, at least for me.
Some women have stage four endometriosis and have no pain and they don't find out that they have it until they can't get pregnant.
It took me almost ten doctors to find someone that actually believed my pain.
Dozens of doctors. I've seen so many.
I probably saw more than 35 physicians.
Robin Pomeroy: So, Shannon, Endometriosis, how did you come to this condition? Why did you decide to focus on this for a movie?
Shannon Cohn: It's a personal choice and I think a lot of people maybe identify with that when a lot of our life's passions are driven by personal experience and things that resonate with us.
I first had symptoms of endometriosis when I was 16, yet didn't hear the word until I was 29 years old. So this yawning 13-year gap of not being believed actually by health care providers, being told my symptoms were in my head or part of being a woman, or I was exaggerating. All of the things that now we - the term now that, you know, the hot term is gaslighting. But that's what happens.
I can guarantee you every woman listening to this podcast right now, if if you were to ask her, 'Hey, have you ever gone to the doctor and somehow felt discounted in what you said about your body, about your symptoms?' Almost 100%, if not 100% would say, yes. It is a universal experience as a woman to somehow be doubted directly or indirectly about symptoms that you have when you go into a health care provider's office.
We have screened this film every continent except for Antarctica, they're holding out on us so far. And I ask audience members, who has not been believed? Without fail everybody raises their hand and smiles because it's you know, it's a common understanding, even though it's not funny. But yes, it's a universal situation.
Robin Pomeroy: Shannon Cohn on her film Below the Belt - which is also the title of that episode of Radio Davos from April 2023. And for more on gender equality, check out an episode from July called How we can close the global gender gap - and why we should - all about the World Economic Forum’s annual Gender Gap Report.
But staying with health, have you ever heard the term 'value based health care'? It's something the World Economic Forum is working on, which is about health services that are based on outcomes, rather than procedures - something that should be more cost efficient, and deliver better experiences for patients.
The term value based health care was coined in 2006 in a book by Harvard professor Michael Porter. So the idea has been around for getting on for two decades. And as you'll hear in this episode, it seems like a kind of obvious way forward for the evolution of health care in different systems around the world.
I spoke to Meni Styliadou, Founder of the Health Outcomes Observatory and VP Health Data Partnerships at the Data Science Institute at the pharmaceuticals company Takeda.
And she had plenty to say on how difficult it is to turn around a big system like a health care system:
Meni Styliadou, Founder and Co-lead of the Health Outcomes Observatory and VP Health Data Partnerships, Data Science Institute, Takeda: Having come from the technology sector, I was very surprised with inefficiencies I found in health care, with this misalignment of incentives. And, having read the book, I said, that's it, it's so clear what needs to happen. I decided, let's organise a conference in Brussels. We had the conference. The commissioner was there. There were a couple of ministers, captains of the industry, 200 people in the audience. And I felt job done. Now, it was going to take 3 to 5 years maximum for this to really resonate with everybody.
Robin Pomeroy: You felt it was job done because...
Meni Styliadou: It was obvious.
Robin Pomeroy: It's win-win all around and there will be efficiencies and everyone's experience is going to improve. Sorry, I interrupted you. Why was it not job done then in the next couple of years?
Meni Styliadou: That's a really good question. And I spent the rest of the last 15 years trying to figure it out.
In reality it's is a big change. It's a huge change of the system. And it is a really big change of the way hospitals operate, of the way health care professionals are being rewarded. to a certain extent.
So it is a massive change. And governments decide to do these big changes, where there is a big opportunity or a big threat of some sort.
And in that case, we may actually be reaching that tipping point because we are, as a society, we are ageing, the health care expenditure continues rising, and as a society, we can't quite afford the same type of health care.
But it needs a crisis because such a big change often requires some type of crisis, or some type of huge innovation. In the case of health care, I actually believe that we are approaching this tipping point because we have a bit of both.
So on one hand, we have the crisis. The crisis is emerging everywhere. On the other hand, we also have the technology innovation which comes through digital technologies.
Robin Pomeroy: Meni Styliadou. And if you are curious as to what that concept, 'value based health care', could actually mean in practice, do seek out that episode, from November, it is called Quality over quantity: why the time has come for 'value based health care' - and on it, we also speak to a doctor putting it into practice.
Time for one last dip into the Radio Davos 2023 catalogue: With climate change always topping the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, we are always looking for ways to tackle this urgent and complex problem. Nature-based solutions can play a big role and among them is, of course, trees.
Environmental scientist Tom Crowther’s research a few years ago into the massive potential of trees to absorb carbon helped spur the Trillion Trees movement to plant, restore and conserve forests. But that research also caused misunderstanding.
As he published updated research, Tom took the opportunity to stress that growing trees must increase biodiversity, and not lead to monoculture plantations, and that it must never be an excuse to slow the drive to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions:
Thomas Crowther, professor, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich: It's important to remember that a forest is not just a load of sticks of trees. They're not just sticks of carbon. These are diverse, thriving ecosystems, and it's the biodiversity within them that allows them to capture and store all of that carbon in the long term as a wonderful by-product.
But yes, our research on forests, I'll put it lightly, it's been a rollercoaster ride. So about four and a half years ago we published a paper in the journal Science showing that the restoration of Earth's forests could capture around 200 gigatons of carbon. That's 200 billion tonnes of carbon, which would make it a really useful contribution in the fight against climate change. It's about a third of our climate change carbon drawdown goals.
And when that paper came out, it went absolutely viral. It was headlines in every media. It inspired the launch of the UN's Trillion Tree Campaign. WEF launched their 1t.org The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration was initiated. This was a time when nature was really heavily in the conversation.
But it also came with downsides because it was also a moment where greenwashing exploded. This idea that you could just plant a few trees and ignore the very real and urgent challenges of cutting emissions and conserving the ecosystems we have.
And this idea of mass tree planting really just exploded. And it led to a huge amount of controversy because obviously academics and scientists and NGOs all across the planet were outraged: mass tree planting has nothing to do with global restoration and the recovery of ecosystems. And yet there's this really dangerous idea that companies are just going to go, okay, we'll carry on emitting our carbon, bang a few trees in the ground and everything's done. Not only would that probably damage the ecosystems that they're planting in, it would be devastating because ongoing greenhouse gas emissions would continue to limit the sustainability of those ecosystems in the long term.
So it was a moment where nature came to the fore, but also greenwashing came to the fore. And so it's been a really turbulent time for the last few years. This threat of greenwashing is an insidious threat, and it has undermined the entire environmental movement.
Robin Pomeroy: Well, that's that's quite a statement.
Thomas Crowther: Yes, it's been an intense time, and I've obviously experienced the intensity of that conversation from within. It's been a pretty brutal time. It's been a horrible four years of my life, particularly as an ecologist who loves the complexity of nature, to be linked with this message about mass planting of trees is devastating.
Robin Pomeroy: Tom Crowther is a professor at ETH Zurich, speaking on an episode called "Not just sticks of carbon" - how growing trees for the climate must also benefit biodiversity.
That was just a small selection from the many weekly episodes Radio Davos published this year - you can catch up on all of them on wef.ch/podcasts or on any podcast app. And don’t miss our other podcasts, including Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues. And join the conversation about podcasts on the World Economic Forum Podcast club on Facebook.
Thanks to everyone who has joined us on the podcast this year and to my colleagues who have helped put them together.
Radio Davos will be back in 2024, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.
Podcast Editor, World Economic Forum
Emma Charlton
November 22, 2024