Designing resilience and celebrating impact: Davos 2025

The mountains around the Swiss village of Davos are famously stunning. But this year, I experienced a memorable moment at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting with my eyes closed.

The Prime Minister of Bhutan, Tshering Tobgay, gave a remarkable talk on the built environment. He hadn’t prepared a speech – instead he invited everyone in the room to close their eyes and imagine the city of the future. We all imagined the city Bhutan aims to create – one that meets the complex challenges of protecting the environment, generating power, and, most importantly, looking after its people. The experience fit perfectly with Bhutan’s extraordinary national ethos: to focus on happiness rather than GDP. And that moment also delivered something that Davos excels at: bringing a diverse set of people together to address multi-faceted real-world challenges.

Climate at the heart of high-level discussions

While sessions were wide-ranging, two themes dominated the week-long summit: the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact of geopolitics. Many conversations explored the accelerating applications and implications of AI, while shifting global dynamics were clearly also on many people’s minds.

But everywhere I went, one thing I found exciting was the way the conversation about climate change has matured. Climate has gone from being an isolated topic to becoming embedded in all of today’s most pressing themes. This was especially striking to me in two sectors of particular importance for the insurance industry: AI and finance.

AI: Short-term pain, long-term gain

In Davos, one conversation I participated in on AI focused on its climate impact in the short term, and on the energy required to power its extraordinary growth. It is clear that companies powering new data centers and training AI models consume considerable amounts of energy. Headlines suggesting that by 2027 this might equate to the needs of a small country are certainly alarming. We cannot afford to overlook the potential climate impacts of this groundbreaking technology.

However, in the long term, AI has enormous potential to help us address climate challenges by accelerating innovation and enabling us to do things more efficiently. It can be an accelerant to decarbonization – helping with everything from developing new materials and optimizing the energy footprint of buildings to mapping climate-critical icebergs, weather patterns, and wildfires.

Another positive I discussed with my fellow attendees was that the technology companies spearheading AI have so far shown vocal commitment to decarbonization. They have set ambitious deadlines and are building climate considerations into their processes. In the future, as countries and companies race to innovate, powering AI with low-carbon energy will represent a competitive advantage.

Finance: The importance of insurance

Climate also features more prominently in the finance conversation. A significant amount of discussion in Davos focused on the fact that climate is now a key factor informing investment decisions. One element, less widely discussed, stood out to me: insurance as the vital lubricant of the financial system. Without insurance, banks and organizations are reluctant to invest. From the deployment of renewable energies to technology to capture and store carbon emissions, from low carbon building materials to alternative marine fuels, funding won’t be forthcoming if stakeholders can’t insure their investment.

It is therefore crucial that we engage in conversation around the role of insurance, and how to ensure it is a project enabler rather than a source of friction or a blocker. For instance, when it comes to developing new technologies, there is insurance that can help manage the strategic, financial, and operational risks. For operational risks in particular, we may need fresh thinking on how to model when, by definition, new technologies lack historical data.

Beyond new technology risks, we need to design long-term resilience into these new assets, to ensure they are resilient to future climate conditions and that they are insurable far into the future.

De-risking supply chains

Moving from the big picture to individual sessions, the twin challenges of climate change and risk management were clear to see when I took part in a panel discussion on supply chain resilience. There is recognition at the highest level that a lack of visibility can leave organizations vulnerable to disruptions originating deep in their supply chains. Climate impacts – from flooding to heat stress affecting workers – are prime examples. Robust supply chain risk assessment is no longer seen as a luxury, but as a necessity, and this was confirmed in new research by Oliver Wyman: nearly 60% of NYSE-listed CEOs are planning to diversify or de-risk their supply chains, or have already started.

It was also positive to hear that, beyond climate considerations, addressing supply chain vulnerabilities can help drive wider sustainable practices across businesses. One such example is by identifying the risk of human rights abuses in the supply chain: this will be increasingly important as governments bring in tighter regulation and step up reporting requirements.

Celebrating a milestone

Of course, it’s not only large companies that face increasingly complex risk and climate vulnerability. So it was very special for me to end my week in Davos by celebrating the tenth anniversary of Blue Marble. This company, created through collaboration across the insurance industry, creates microinsurance protection for underserved communities. By helping to bridge the insurance protection gap, it supports some of the world’s most vulnerable people and enables them to build climate resilience. From coffee farmers in Colombia to women entrepreneurs in India, Blue Marble has impacted the lives of 300,000 people and provided over US$100 million in protection.

This anniversary is proof that Davos can be the starting point for lasting real-world impact. And that climate resilience comes in many guises: from the head of a tiny mountain country inviting the whole room to co-design the city of the future, to the insurance industry coming together to create solutions for vulnerable communities.

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Designing resilience and celebrating impact: Davos 2025