Stakeholder Capitalism by Klaus Schwab

Author:Klaus Schwab [Schwab, Klaus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

7

People and the Planet

At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge that we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so. And the media has failed to create broad public awareness.1

These were the words from Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, as she spoke in Davos at our Annual Meeting in January 2019. Thunberg had become known for her School Strike for Climate a few months earlier, shaking up the debate about what has increasingly become known as the global climate crisis. In Davos, she used the platform to give the world a hard wake-up call on the actions needed to avert catastrophe. “Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope,’” she said at a special press conference. “But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”2 After decades of scientific warnings and government discussions, how did a teenager become the world's most notable voice on climate change?

Thunberg, born on January 3, 2003, first learned of climate change in 2011, when she was still in primary school. Despite her young age, she already realized there was a gap “in what several climate experts were saying, and the actions that were being taken in society.”3 It made her both anxious and sad. It preoccupied her to the point that she couldn't stop worrying about it. Why was no one taking action? Why were we letting our natural environment degrade? These were questions she pondered all the time. She did what she could do to help. She convinced her parents to become vegan and even stop flying—a significant change for her mother, who until then had traveled all around Europe as a prominent opera singer.

It turned out that Thunberg's single-mindedness was of a particular kind. She was diagnosed with a form of autism marked by “restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviors or interests.”4 But she would not let that get in the way of her advocacy. “I have Asperger's and that means I'm sometimes a bit different from the norm,” she wrote to her critics.5 “But,” she also said, “given the right circumstances, being different is a superpower.” From her perspective, worrying about climate change was something everyone else should do much more, because the problem was real. Maybe others were distracted by the more immediate day-to-day problems in front of them, but she was not. She saw it as her duty to make sure others understood the urgency just as fully.

By summer of 2018 Thunberg had taken her advocacy a step further. As Swedish parliamentary elections

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