Davos Diary 2020

A Mountaintop Experience

As a Schwab Social Entrepreneur, my husband and I were invited to the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020. It is supposedly the gathering of the elites, the state heads, the royals, the ministers, the industry giants, the policymakers, the activists, the prominent thought leaders and the UN officials.

Professor Klaus Schwab and his wife, Hilde Schwab, started this annual gathering 50 years ago, which is essentially a global platform where all the world leaders can come together to discuss solutions to the world problems. This is quite a unique opportunity where so many principal parties and decision makers involved in particular issues can be in one place at the same time. The Forum facilitates connections and new initiatives, which enable faster breakthroughs and effective decision makings. This is the value of the Forum, and why so many people still want to come and meet every year.

Professor Klaus and Hilde Schwab also founded the Schwab Foundation 20 years ago. The purpose of the foundation is to support an under-recognized movement of people who were developing innovative business models delivering social and environmental good. Its mission is to empower social entrepreneurs such as my husband by giving him credibility and visibility to other existing global leaders (who otherwise would have never known we exist) and spurring collaborations that can scale up operations and accelerate progress.

We felt honored by the invitation. It elevates us to the global platform, legitimizes our work and gives us a seat at the table as peers of world leaders. But above all, our hearts are touched by the affirming hands of the Lord. Our Father in heaven was encouraging us despite the significant challenges we experienced in 2019.

Davos is a Swiss mountain village and a popular ski resort area. The trip took more than 30 hours from Jakarta to Zurich, with a 12-hour transit at Doha, and then we needed to take another three-hour train ride from Zurich moving up the Alps mountain towards Davos. We were severely sleep-deprived when we arrived at the hotel.

At the beginning of the conference, we weren’t fully recovered yet from our trip and jet-lag. One morning, Tommy had an important breakfast meeting with one of the Indonesian ministers and right after that he had to present in a session about Engineering Sustainable Plastics. He felt exhausted, worried and nervous, which is unlike the typical Tommy. 

That morning before his session, Tommy unexpectedly received a WhatsApp message from a total stranger. The message was a Bible verse from 1 Peter 5:6-7: “Humble yourselves, then, under God’s mighty hand. So that He will lift you up in His own good time. Leave all your worries with Him, because He cares for you.” Almost instantly, there’s a calm washed over him. It is like God personally gave him a private message through this stranger. 

The session turned out well and enjoyable. After the session, Tommy tried to trace and track this stranger. It turned out she was the wife of a friend whom Tommy had met at the Haggai conference in Summer 2018, and it was her habit to send verses to people daily. And on that day, she happened to go through and send verses to her husband’s phone contact list? Unbelievable!

The conference was four days long, and there were 400 sessions to choose from. I had the opportunity to gain some exposure on the following topics: inclusivity, inequality, health access, climate change, plastics waste, biodiversity, humanitarian crises, mental health, upskilling and reskilling for future jobs, urban planning, aging populations, cybersecurity.

Tommy and I went to different sessions throughout the day, sometimes we promised to rendezvous at the central lounge where there was a continuous flow of food and drink. The little streets of Davos were also crowded with people. There were parties and gatherings scattered all around the village at various hotels and establishments. There were Indonesia night and India night that we went to because we missed eating Asian food. 

My husband teased me, he said that it must be the ultimate theme-park experience for me. He was right; I was having the time of my life. There were great stimulating sessions and experiences to choose from and free flow of food to my heart’s content. Getting to meet many inspiring people that work at the ground and from the power suites stirred my mind and emotion deeply. I was overwhelmed to experience all this.

I would like to share three topics that I have learned, and I think they are important for us to know. Honestly, I hadn’t known much about these three topics before my week in WEF. These three topics are stakeholder capitalism, mental health and climate change. I hope this information will be useful to you.

Stakeholder Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that is widely accepted in the world as the system that works. In capitalism, we appreciate capital more than labor. So the system will reward people who have capital much more than people who only contribute their labor to the economy. The people who have capital will propagate more capital growth while those who don’t have much capital are pretty much stay put. Thus, the system naturally exacerbates inequality. 

Oxfam, a major nonprofit group, reported that in 2019 the world’s billionaires of 2,153 people have more wealth between them than 4.6 billion people. It is an inconceivable chasm of inequality. There is something inherently and morally wrong with this picture. The system perpetuates the pursuit of profit and wealth to no end with no consideration for the people that are further left behind. 

On a train ride to Davos, we met another social entrepreneur from South America who is currently working with the Catholic Church to design a revised model of capitalism that will not leave people behind. He believes that it is possible and I hope he is right. I hope we can find a new version of capitalism, a compassionate capitalism, instead of a soulless system.

In shareholder capitalism, we want to maximize the values for the shareholders. The ultimate loyalty of the enterprise is to the shareholders, whose capitals are invested in the enterprise. In WEF, they propose the concept of stakeholder capitalism instead. Professor Klaus already came up with this notion of stakeholder capitalism many years ago when WEF just started. This idea of stakeholder capitalism starts to gain traction recently.

In stakeholder capitalism, the ultimate loyalty of the enterprise is to the stakeholders, whose livelihood will be impacted by the enterprise, economically, socially and environmentally. The stakeholders include the workforce, the communities where the company operates, even the wider society (the government and the civil society) that authorize the company’s activities. 

Instead of having a percentage of your profit allocated for corporate social responsibility projects, the company embeds its social and environmental impacts directly to the calculation of bottom-line profit and loss. The economic, social and environmental outcomes are all closely linked with the company’s performance. If we can revise our profit-and-loss statement to include environment and social gain and loss, then the business strategy and approach will be different. This is the link to “Davos Manifesto” if you like to understand deeper. 

The challenge would be on how to quantify those social and environmental impacts and convert them to numbers. For example, from the environmental standpoint, we can calculate the total number of carbon emissions from our company’s processes. We then calculate the environmental cost, such as the carbon tax and the environmental damage, in consequence of those emissions. As you can see, there is still a learning curve for us to implement this stakeholder capitalism because we are not used to thinking in these terms and metrics.

What can we do as ordinary people? We can vote with our wallets. When we decide to make a purchase or an investment, we need to investigate the products and the companies’ social and environmental values, not just its economic values. Our votes exert powerful pressure to shape the priorities and the behaviors of these corporations.

We also need to be aware that some corporations might be good and clean, but the supply chain behind those corporations might not be. We need to ask if these corporations buy supplies from other entities that also implement fair trade with their sources, submit to the labor laws and observe the environmental regulations?

From the biblical standpoint, I think this is a move in the right direction. It acknowledges a more holistic view of a person that needs to love their neighbors as Christ loves us and to take care and tend the garden (the earth) God entrusted to us. Stakeholder capitalism is more in line with the biblical model.

Mental Health

I was uninformed of the extent of mental health problems before coming to WEF. I regularly hear on the news of high-profile people that are plagued by clinical depression and an ever-increasing number of suicide attempts among teenagers. Still, I didn’t realize how pervasive and ubiquitous the problem of mental health was.

75% of mental health problems will usually show up by the time a person reaches 25 years old. The period between 12 to 25 years of age is the critical time when most of the mental health issues start to surface in an individual. It is good if we can detect early. Suicide became the second leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 29 years globally in 2016; one person dies because of suicide every 40 seconds.

It was especially intriguing for me when the executive director of UNICEF revealed the two top worries of youth. First, the youth feels that they get an outdated education, and they worry about their job prospects. Second, they worry about their existence with the looming threat of climate change. In short, the future seems bleak and hopeless.

I can empathize with their first worry as a mother who concerns for her child’s education. It is an open secret that current education systems are outdated and will not be able to prepare the youths well for the future, especially in developing countries. At the same time, progressive schools are very expensive and beyond reach for most people. There seems to be no visible path for upward social mobility.

Coincidentally, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that week about mental illness among evangelical pastors. Some Christian pastors testified how they were discharged swiftly and quite unmercifully after they told the church leadership about their conditions. I suspect the decisions are made out of fear because most of us are unfamiliar and ill-equipped for handling mental health conditions.

We need to include the topic of mental health in our conversations and educate ourselves. In doing that, we help to break the silence, end the stigma and encourage the people who are struggling alone to seek help. If there is more community engagement, people can have more confidence in battling mental illness. We need to be more empathetic, to actively listen instead of quick to pass judgments.

What I learned from those sessions is mental illness is a real sickness, just like physical illness, albeit unseen. Just like physical illness, mental illness can be induced by external factors and circumstances, but it can also be caused by internal factors such as genetics dispositions, hormonal and chemical imbalances. I believe that there is a place for emotional and spiritual healing, forgiveness and reconciliation to help some aspect of mental illness, and there is also a place for clinical and therapeutic help to address the bodily aspect of it.

Another fascinating insight comes from the study by some universities in the U.S. They try to find a correlation between the geographical features of an area (using satellite readings) with mental health in that area. What they find is green space is good for mental health. Poorer areas tend to be more cramped and have less green space, and they also have a higher number of crime incidents.

An experiment was done in the city of Philadelphia in the U.S. They put green plants in some vacant lots, and they saw a 29% drop in gun violence in that area. People with higher exposure to nature has better resilience in coping with poverty and delayed gratification. Children’s access to greenness also plays a part in their future mental health.

Another experiment that was done to animals shows that there is a systemic breakdown happening socially, psychologically and physically if a species is not put in its natural habitat. Green spaces are good for people’s overall health. 

The global trend is more and more people are moving into the cities where green spaces are limited, and we should not be surprised by the increase in mental health problems. We urgently need to build more green spaces scattered throughout our cities. Ultimately, it will also be good for the economy if we have a healthier society. 

Climate Change

Climate Change took center stage for this year’s conference. Most government bodies, businesses and scientists agree that climate change is the pressing concern of this generation. It is a crisis at the planetary level.

The fact is if we continue business as usual, the earth’s temperature will increase by > 4º C in the next ten years, while temperature increase above 1.5-2º C means whatever damages we have done to earth will be irreversible. Natural chain reactions will happen with exponential effects, and there will be more occurrences of extreme natural behaviors.

The truth is if we cannot solve climate change, none of the other sessions really matters because climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. We don’t need to wait ten years to start seeing the negative effects, people in Africa and some coastal areas already felt the impacts of climate change on their crops and water supply. 

So how do we prevent this increase of temperature? It is actually a simple math problem. The scientists have calculated an allocated quota of carbon emissions until 2030. As long as our carbon footprint does not go over that quota by 2030, then we are good. We need to decrease our carbon emissions to nature and increase our carbon absorption from nature so that we will not exceed the quota by 2030.

A tree is an effective machine to capture and absorb carbon from nature. One of WEF’s initiatives is to plant one trillion trees by 2030.  Yet planting trees alone is not enough to slow down the temperature increase. We need fundamental changes from the current practices of production and operation, and we need to ramp up the transitions fast. 

There is a huge cost involved because changing to green practices would initially mean reducing competitiveness and slowing down economic growth. This is actually the crux of the problem.

In an ideal world, we want everybody to work and bear the cost together for a better-shared future. The dynamics get complicated if there is a big player like the United States who wants to continue business as usual by bailing out from the 2016 Paris agreement. The other countries feel shortchanged by the U.S. free-riding behavior (enjoying the economic benefits while expecting others to clean up the environmental mess). Until now, the U.S. government still officially denies the reality of climate change as a human-made problem, and they hope that some technology in the future can tackle this problem, which we don’t have yet as of now.

We also need to move away from financing explorations and extractions of fossil-based fuel. The good news is the appetites are growing for green investing that promotes sustainable development, clean technologies and renewable energy. Governments and businesses are raising trillions of dollars for the green industry and low-carbon sectors. They already gain some momentum, although it still feels like moving a mountain. We need to change big and fast to be on track with our goal of temperature increase below 1.5-2ºC. 

We want to eventually achieve a ‘net zero carbon’ lifestyle, which means the carbon we emit can be equally absorbed, so there will be no carbon excess released to nature. Reaching this equilibrium state seems doable. The problem is we are now already in a deficit mode, and every day we are still emitting new tons of carbon emission and decimating precious forests. The in-flow and out-flow of carbon are way out of balance. The concerning aspect of this reality is that we are literally racing against time. Stewarding the environment is all about human survival.

The Decade of Delivery

I often heard the term “decade of delivery” throughout the conference. The United Nations also has an agenda that by 2030, the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) to transform this world will be achieved. Here is a complete list of the 17 goals.

What we do in this next decade will decide the future of us and our planet. Humanity will be tested, and there seems to be no second chance. People say that the heart of the problem is the human heart itself that is bent towards selfishness and greediness. Science fiction movies often ironically portray doom when humans are left to their own devices. People will eventually destroy themselves because their hearts lead them to irrational behaviors. 

So can we rise above our inherent flaws? Can our collective effort be enough to alter the trajectory of our fate? These are the questions that stay with me at the end of the conference. I admit there is always a part of us that wants to believe in the good side of people and keep our hopes afloat. Yet looking at the facts and the reality around, it is hard not to be pessimistic. 

As God’s children, our hope is ultimately in Him. We believe there is another layer of super macro-reality that we could not see. Jesus already came at one point in history, and He promised that He would come back again. When He comes back, He will redeem and renew everything. 

We are in the waiting period now, and it is painful to watch what is happening. The small acts of redemption and renewing that we can do in our own little spheres give us little moments of joy and hope that sustain us. Our faithful little actions are also mirroring of what is coming. When Jesus comes again, the renewal will happen in entirety.

Coming Down the Mountain

As our train was traveling down the mountain towards Zurich, my husband jokingly commented that maybe it was also time for me to come down from my own mountain (my comfort zone) and do something. I just chuckled in response. It was inspiring, overwhelming and heavy to be exposed to all that activism and humanism in those few days.

I am not sure if these activists believe in evolution theory or the creation theory, but what they are doing is restoring the image of God in these vulnerable people who live in degraded living conditions. Providing means for people to have access to employment, food, medical, protection of law and education is giving dignity to people. They inadvertently become the voice to the voiceless.

I believe loving fellow humans and loving His creation is a critical mandate from God. It is a huge opportunity to show that there is a loving God with a beautiful blueprint for the world. Each of our lives is a creative expression of God for a purpose bigger than ourselves. Through our calling, resource and talent, we can give a “sneak peek” of His love and His blueprint to the longing and watching world. 

The world has so many systemic and multi-layered problems, and it can confuse, overwhelm and paralyze us to start doing anything. Greta Thunberg, a young climate activist, eloquently said, “Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flame by the hour.” Maybe it is time to come down from our mountain and bring positive impacts in our little parts of the broken world?

Note: I met Dame Jane Goodall at the WEF 2020. She is quite a legend, a famous primatologist and anthropologist. Listening to her work touched my heart deeply. She recently had a short interview with CNN about keeping hope in these dark times.