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Things could heat up in chilly Davos

Workers clear away snow at the entrance to the Congress Centre in Davos Keystone

A warm welcome from swissinfo.ch to a snow-clad Davos. The 47th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum kicks off in earnest on Tuesday.

Swiss resorts have been waiting a long time for the snow. It finally arrived over the weekend. There was so much, in fact, that it closed down the popular Schatzalp toboggan run on Saturday. The unpredictability of global temperatures and weather patterns will feature in a number of sessions on the environment in Davos. One session, on Wednesday, will ask if countries are living up to the commitments they made under the December 2015 Paris climate treaty.

Leading climate scientists will set up an Arctic Base camp alongside WEF to talk about changes to Arctic temperatures. Former US Vice President Al Gore will appear with Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos.

I will be following that event, and much more besides.

President Xi Jinping will become the first Chinese leader to address WEF on Tuesday. He has arrived in Switzerland with a large entourage of politicians and business leaders. Chinese companies have been particularly active in Switzerland in recent years. The Chinese state-owned chemical company ChemChina, for example, has taken over the global Swiss agribusiness Syngenta for $43 billion. China’s Haers Vacuum Containers snapped up Swiss bottle maker Sigg. Chinese conglomerate HNA Group swallowed airline support services Swissport and Gategroup.

On Friday, as the Davos meeting is in full swing, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. He has sent representatives of his transition team to Davos. At the same time, outgoing US Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry will be speaking in Davos.

I’ll also be finding out what Switzerland’s full admission to the European Union’s Horizon 2020 scientific funding programme means for the host country. And I’ll also be following up on what Switzerland is doing to return billions of francs in frozen dictator funds to Tunisia.

WEF will also focus on the ongoing tragic conflicts in Syria and Iraq and the consequent refugee crisis that has deeply impacted on Europe. In the Western world, leaders are looking over their shoulders at the rise of populism with a perceived middle class voter backlash – what will 2017 bring?

That’s just the tip of the metaphoric iceberg. The World “Everything” Forum is bound, as always, to throw up a few surprises.

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SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR