It’s that time of year again: Davos. The mountain retreat for billionaires, heads of state and CEOs. The main discussion course: the Global Risks Report from the World Economic Forum.
Anyone who reads this report will notice something curious. In the long term, the greatest risks remain ecological: climate change, biodiversity loss, depletion of natural systems. It’s a consistent picture, year after year. But in the short term, something else comes to the fore: trade conflicts, strategic dependencies, power politics around raw materials and technology. Geo-economics is the new urgency.
While ecological disruption is acknowledged as a structural problem, it is relegated to the future. Something for later. Geo-economic tensions are seen as acute and manageable. Something for now. As a result, climate change shifts from being the main issue to a background variable - something to be taken into account, not something that sets the direction.
And that is the result of one thing: power. Power inequality is the factor that connects everything and amplifies the risks. As a junction, as a catalyst. Where naked power politics dominate and corporate interests align with state interests, climate risks become strategic opportunities.
Greenland, once the symbol of climate change with melting ice and endangered polar bears as a warning to humanity, is now mainly a strategic target. Beneath the ice lie rare earth metals. Melting ice opens up new shipping routes. And above the ice lies geopolitical advantage in a world that is rearming. Trump wants to buy the island - not despite the warming, but because of it. The rise in temperature continues, but it is the balance of power that now determines its meaning.
What is an ecological disaster for one party becomes a strategic opportunity for another. The benefits accrue to states and corporations with influence. The costs are borne by vulnerable groups, elsewhere and later. This is the core issue that the Global Risks Report exposes, but does not explore. The report identifies inequality as the risk that connects all others, but stops at that observation. Yet in practice, inequality is a mechanism. It determines who can delay the transition, who can pass on the costs, who can frame the debate. It explains why climate can be parked as a long-term issue: those with the power to offload risks do not experience them as urgent.
For those sitting at the Davos table, climate is merely a factor in scenarios. For someone living in a draughty house with an energy bill rising every month, it is a cost. For someone seeing their habitat disappear, it is an irrevocable loss. These are not different problems; they are different positions within the same system.
For a while, we thought that enlightened leaders would take more responsibility, also in Davos. But now, with their own report in hand, the conclusion is different: those who hold power see the undermining of that power as the greatest risk. Ecology can wait. Thus, we create a world in which we appear to act rationally. We acknowledge ecological risks in the long term and manage geo-economic tensions in the short term. We allow inequality to be the fabric connecting the two. And we call it realism.
But that’s not what it is. It is the logic of power. Those who can offload risks, will do so. Greenland is not a climate problem for those who can extract resources from it - it is an opportunity. The climate problem is for later, and for others. And by then, the ones with power will have long since insulated themselves, with the money now being made from the crisis. That’s not a side effect of the system. It is the system.
This column was originally published in Dutch in Vrij Nederland.
