With 17 sessions on climate change, this year's World Economic Forum, which opened at Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, is expected to be one of the "greenest" ever.

 

The five-day annual meeting, following the theme "The Shifting Power Equation," will attract more than 2,400 global leaders including over 800 CEOs to the snow-covered Swiss Alpine town.

 

The sessions related to environmental issues will focus on themes such as "The Legal Landscape around Climate Change," "Make Green Pay," "The Security Implications of Climate Change," "Economics of Climate Change" and "Climate Change: A Call to Action."

 

John McCain, US senator and Republican presidential frontrunner, Zhang Xiaoqiang, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission of the People's Republic of China, and Montek Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Indian Planning Commission, will be the keynote speakers at the session.

 

According to the organizers, the forum has attracted the world's top academics, business leaders, NGO representatives, UN agency chiefs, politicians and many others.

 

Broadly, the sessions on climate change will deal with the following topics: policy, legislative and governance challenges, market and financing challenges, the challenge of leadership and the need for behavioral change as well as development and innovation.

 

"We are getting huge demand from our members to place climate change and issues of environmental security at the very heart of the program of the World Economic Forum," said Dominic Waughray, head of Environmental Initiatives at the Forum.

 

"The program at this year's annual meeting just shows how crucial business leaders believe climate and environmental issues are and how serious they are in finding real solutions in partnership with governments and leading NGOs," he added.

 

The World Economic Forum is a Geneva-based non-governmental organization with a claimed goal of improving the state of the world by engaging leaders from business and political circles to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

 

(Xinhua News Agency January 24, 2007)