The recent World Economic Forum in Davos focused on the environment, healthcare and social equality, or what is known as Global Commons. Per tradition, Davos was reproached for being a gathering of big business and top politicians concerned solely with financial and economic matters while disregarding the voice of the people. Influenced by anti-globalists, a sort of anti-Davos forum was launched last decade, called the World Social Forum, to concentrate on social inequality in the world, the rift between the Golden Billion and the rest of mankind, social ecology, etc.

       It was also during the past decade that the old term “global problems” was converted to Global Commons (understood in both a narrowly ecological and a wider social sense). It was discussed within the framework of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and at various international venues. It was not by chance therefore that the Davos Forum (obviously to mend its image as a purely economic event) began paying increasingly more attention to these issues. This year’s meeting is no exception in this sense.

       The state leaders that addressed Davos this year included Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His address was notable for prioritizing environmental issues. Rather unexpectedly for a pragmatic economic forum, his speech was filled with quotations from Old Indian philosophical writings, the Upanishads and other texts. They emphasized humanities’ unity with nature, our symbiosis with Mother Earth, the concept of Suryaputra (Sun’s Children), and other things. The political consequences of this were presented in the context of the recent Indian initiative to create an International Solar Alliance that would unite countries located between the North and South tropics with the purpose of encouraging the more active use of solar energy as a Global Common.

       Simultaneously, the Prime Minister dwelled on problems of a divided world. In his opinion, the main barrier to planetary unity is the gap between the rich and the poor countries. He analyzed this point in detail against the background of the climate change problem, noting that the advanced countries called for restrictions on the emission of greenhouse gases and for a carbon-free economy, but were unwilling to share the relevant technologies with the developing world. In fact, he made a direct claim to the effect that new high technologies were also a Global Common and therefore should be accessible to all countries and peoples. If they are not, we will see an even wider rift between the rich and the poor. Thus, the old problem that rich countries deprive poorer ones of a chance to develop under the pretext of environmental barriers and restrictions becomes current again. Another related problem, according to Prime Minister Modi, is the developing countries’ actual underrepresentation in many international organizations, primarily financial and economic; their voice is much less audible globally than that of the developed countries. As a result, his main message was that dealing with global social and economic inequality was crucial to solving environmental problems.

       Jack Ma of Alibaba Group also talked a lot about Global Commons, focusing on the technological aspects of development, specifically artificial intelligence that is expected to change the world in significant ways. He dwelled on the dangers involved in advances in the area of artificial intelligence, primarily displacement of humans from the labor market, since in many technological operations robots and other machines are objectively more efficient than people. This may lead to a surge in unemployment and poverty and, as a consequence, to the growth of violence and recruitment by extremist and terrorist organizations. Human beings may become increasingly redundant in the context of planetary development and this, given the continuing growth of the world population, is possibly the most serious global challenge we will face. Jack Ma called for coordinating efforts lest artificial intelligence becomes a threat to mankind rather than an aid in its pursuits. This amounted to an admission that artificial intelligence should be regarded as being part of the Global Commons as well.

       In this context, Jack Ma focused on education in the world. In his words, education should make people wiser and unique rather than cleverer than computers and artificial intelligence (which is less and less practicable). For this reason, he claimed, a thorough global education reform was necessary (also seen as a Global Common), without which people will find themselves marginalized in a world of artificial intelligence some 30 years from now.

       As for the environment and its political implications, Davos held a special session on the oceans. A new international project, Friends of the Oceans, will be launched later this year. The process began last summer at the UN Ocean Conference organized by Fiji and Sweden. Apart from maintaining the traditional emphasis on preserving biodiversity in the oceans, the project is aimed at reforming the economic approaches to oceanic exploration. In this connection, the forum called for a New Ocean Economy.

       Davos participants considered healthcare in the light of ecology, both in the sense that a clean environment was a positive influence on health and in the socio-ecological sense. Speakers made frequent use of a new term, Health Ecology, meaning a global transition to patient-centered healthcare that should form the core of the New Health Paradigm. A separate session was devoted to the fourth industrial revolution and its impact on health care, including AI assisted doctors, ingestible sensors, etc.

       Food was yet another matter reviewed from the environmental point of view. In fact, agriculture (primarily animal husbandry) is responsible for about the same amount of greenhouse emissions as industry or motor vehicles, although the global post-Kyoto mainstream tends to put much less emphasis on this. But sooner or later this problem will have to be addressed as well, something that could lead to growing instability in global food supplies. Moreover, it could create a nutritional sustainability problem in diets for much of the world population and could slow the carbohydrate-to-protein transition in developing countries. In turn, this may affect Health Ecology in the future.

       Generally, Davos put an emphasis on many important problems related to preserving and promoting Global Commons. Now it is necessary to draw up an acceptable and feasible agenda to address them.

       Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.