Business chiefs on Wednesday insisted they are not waiting on bickering governments to fight climate change, after Wall Street titan BlackRock joined a campaign pressuring companies to do more in the buildup to a week of networking in Davos.
Prior to the new decade's first conclave of global decision-makers, the World Economic Forum released a survey that it portrayed as a call to arms, after devastating wildfires in Australia and an inconclusive climate summit in Madrid.
The window to agree on decisive cuts to carbon emissions risks closing in the 2020s and if the world fails to act, "we will be faced with a situation where we are moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic", WEF president Borge Brende told a news conference.
In recent years, climate change and its dismal consequences have emerged as dominant concerns shadowing the WEF's A-list gathering of government and business leaders in the Swiss Alps, along with economic risks.
This time, the WEF's "Global Risks Perception Survey" found the top five categories of concern for the next 10 years were all environmental - headlined by extreme weather events and failure of governments and businesses to forestall climate change. For 2020 alone, economic confrontations and domestic political polarisation were among the shorter-term drivers of anxiety among the more than 750 executives and industry experts surveyed.
The world's most powerful climate denier, US President Donald Trump, will attend Davos next week, after agreeing a deal to defuse a trade war he started with China.
Also returning to Davos will be 17-year-old Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg, who called in British newspaper The Guardian for an end to the "madness" of investing in fossil fuels.
BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion invested, said Tuesday it was divesting holdings in companies that earn more than a quarter of their sales from production of electricity-generating coal.
In his annual letter to US company leaders, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink said markets had been slow to reflect the risk of climate change to business models.
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