simon zadek

There is no peace, says the Lord, for the wicked. But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. (Book of Isaiah 57:20). Classically, yes, but the street level meaning is more often that ‘something not very good is continuing although you might like to stop‘.

The busy-bee activities of the financial community fit this bill rather well right now.…

History will associate Egypt with the last week of January 2011 irrespective of what comes next in what could be a revolutionary moment in the region that the Chinese call ‘West Asia’. But although Davos was eclipsed by real time political transformation, that does not mean that the mountain chatter was in vain.

Davos 2011 may well not go down in history, but maybe it should.…

How much is WEF worth…well, obviously a lot given who it can draw to the table and what folks pay to get in the door and how the media covers Davos in particular…but how much?

Of course one answer is that it is a public interest organisation and cannot be thought about in that way. Trust in commercial organisations is after all painfully low, as the Edelman Trust Barometer for this year highlights.…

Braunwald is a fairyland village high in the Swiss alps above Zurich, reached only by funicular, and around which you can only move by foot, ski, horse or electric buggy. As my contribution to the Swiss economy, i can recommend this stunningly beautiful spot for those wanting to take a break, and the aptly named Bellevue as the place to go with kids (for reasons you will have to discover yourselves).…

Copenhagen was a structured, sovereign-state based negotiation with clear rules of engagement (albeit abused). It had a beginning, middle and (at least in theory) an end. It was designed to reach agreement on a specific set of activities entirely focused on the public good. It was also a veritable ‘walk through babylon’ (as my video clip painfully illustrated), and as we now all know deteriorated into a shambolic, ego-laden, mecantilist dog-fight.…

“We have an Accord that has some of the elements of a legally binding agreement that we need”, opined Achim Steiner from UNEP, “do not under-estimate what we have achieved. And on the trade regime, another year gone and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars investment and income generating on hold and at risk”.

Saturday afternoon, exhaustion showing on peoples’ faces, but an almost full room of folks ponder on the topic of trade and climate.…

Many folks will know the ‘valley of death’ as a stage in the investment cycle of new clusters of investment opportunities where great and potentially profitable ventures cannot progress for lack of the scaled and correctly calibrated risk capital.

Davos this week has exposed a second and far more worrying valley of death. Sessions on water scarcity, deforestation, climate and any number of profoundly relevant topics reveal an underlying cycle.…

Muhtar Kent leads a breakfast discussion about the global challenge of water, leveraging a report launched entitled Charting Our Water Future prepared by McKinsey with numerous other folks. “The global needs of Coca Cola is the equivalent of 8 months use across Mexico City”, we are told alongside Coke’s commitment to become a ‘zero water take’ company.

“We cannot stay as we are, we need to look for another approach…there is a way to deal with the growing gap…today withdrawals are growing at 2% a year, there is a gap of 40% by 2030 between demand (7000 billion cubic meters) and supply…productivity improvements will only deal with 20% of the overall gap, and there is a further 20% of the gap that can be closed by increasing supply in historic ways…that leaves a 60% gap where ‘something different’ needs to be done to address.”

McKinsey has applied the ‘cost curve’ methodology to water and brought crystallized data to the discussion at a high level (see Project Catalyst for how this method has been applied to carbon mitigation).…