The World Economic Forum (WEF) announces its first batch of speakers and sessions for the Sustainable Development Impact Meetings (SDIM) taking place from September 22-26, with billionaire Andre Hoffmann scheduled to make his first appearance under his new title of interim co-chair.
Today, the WEF gave a glimpse into this year’s edition of the SDIM, disclosing the titles of seven sessions while naming 12 speakers in the initial rollout of its 2025 program.
On September 24, WEF interim co-chair Andre Hoffmann is slated to make his first appearance on the stage under his new title, speaking with Yale assistant professor Martha Munoz in a session called “Climate Resilience: Securing Systems, Sustaining Lives.”
It remains to be seen if Hoffmann’s counterpart, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, will make an appearance at this year’s summit.
Speakers and sessions are subject to change.
Last week, the WEF published an insight report called “Finance Solutions for Natures: Pathways to Returns and Outcomes” providing “stakeholders” with dozens of financial solutions for monetizing everything in nature.
WEF president and CEO Borge Brende is also slated to speak with Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan on September 24, although the theme of the discussion remains undisclosed at this time.
Another session scheduled for this year’s WEF Sustainable Development Impact Meetings is “Geopolitics: Looking beyond Uncertainty,” which is the first to take place on September 22.
This panel will hear from US diplomat Victoria Nuland, Observer Research Foundation president Samir Saran, and European Commissioner for International Partnerships Jozef Sikela.
Another discussion taking place on September 24 will be between The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson and Salesforce president Sebastian Niles.
Together, they will tackle “Restoring Trust in Tech.”
What began as the WEF Sustainable Development Impact Summit in 2017, the Sustainable Development Impact Meetings have produced a few viral moments over the years, some of which were broke right here by The Sociable and yours truly.
At the 2024 SDIM, John Kerry made controversial remarks surrounding free speech and misinformation, stating, “Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a truth arbiter” while declaring that “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer [disinformation] out of existence.”
At the 2023 SDIM, panelists Jemilah Mahmood, executive director at Malaysia’s Sunway Centre for Planetary Health; and Vanessa Kerry, CEO at Seed Global Health, special envoy for climate and health at the World Health Organization (WHO), and daughter of US climate czar John Kerry; regurgitated the words of WEF founder Klaus Schwab from his great reset declaration that the pandemic was an opportunity that needed to be applied to the climate change narrative.
According to Mahmood: “The pandemic was an opportunity […] How now do we take the emotion of the health factor, [which] is so critical, but guess what guys? The climate crisis is creating more health issues than you can ever imagine, but no one has been able to make that link in the past.”
Kerry was quick to respond to Mahmood about the narratives linking COVID and climate, stating: “COVID taught us all these lessons learned, and we should be incorporating that, and the climate crisis is going to be so much worse […] but people have forgotten and don’t care, so how do we keep that front-and-center?”
Another viral moment came at the 2022 SDIM when UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications declared “We own the science” while describing how the UN partnered with Google to artificially manipulate search results on climate change, so that only UN-approved resources would appear at the top.
“We partnered with Google,” said Fleming, adding, “for example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources.
“We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.
“We’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do,” she added.
And going back to 2021, when the event was last called a “summit” and not “meetings” one session was dedicated to the concept of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — a civil technology stack consisting of digital identity, fast payment systems, and massive data sharing between public and private entities.
All participants in the scaling public digital infrastructure session, from the moderator to the panelists, were in some way connected to digital identity projects.
This year’s WEF Sustainable Development Impact Meetings takes place from September 22-26.
You can find videos of the three previous editions of the meetings on the WEF website: 2024 here, 2023 here, and 2022 here.
The first Sustainable Development Impact Summit took place in September, 2017.
Below are the WEF’s YouTube playlists of every public session, starting from 2021 and going down to 2017 (click “Watch on YouTube” on the videos below to see the full playlists).
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
Image Source: WEF YouTube screenshot of Andre Hoffmann speaking at the WEF Annual Meeting in 2024
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