Can a science and diplomacy partnership save the world?

This week, political and business leaders are gathering in Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF). 

I’ve reported on that event many times; every year the motto is something that hints at optimistic problem‑solving. Way back in 2008 it was Improving the State of the World. Then, ten years later, it was Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World. This year it’s A Spirit of Dialogue.

Has the WEF ever actually solved any of the pressing challenges our world faces? Climate change? Poverty? Hunger? The unfettered growth of information technology, which has allowed images of women and children to be manipulated to degrade and sexually objectify them? Not that I have noticed.

Inside Geneva

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There’s no doubt the forum talks about these things and in the past I have witnessed truly dedicated, visionary speeches and conversations. But they don’t seem to translate into policy, which begs the question whether such events, and traditional diplomacy as a whole, really work. 

Is conventional diplomacy failing?

This year that question seems especially relevant. Cast a glance down the WEF guest list for 2026, and you might be forgiven for thinking that a good number of the VIPs attending are not in fact solving the world’s problems, but making them actively worse and even inventing new ones.

+ Davos turns into ‘Little America’

So, do we need a new form of diplomacy, since our current political and business leaders seem to be failing so badly? One where scientific developments like artificial intelligence (AI), or environmental challenges like climate change, can be discussed objectively among experts in the field and government leaders?

Well, guess what? There is actually such an organisation, and it’s the topic of our Inside Geneva podcast this week. The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator, or GESDA for short, was founded in the city that bears its name, with the support of the Swiss government. It brings together scientists, politicians, diplomats and business leaders to discuss what might be coming down the line in science and technology and what kind of societal and governmental responses might be needed.

In a fascinating interview, GESDA’s director general, Marilyne Andersen, told me, “We have in our hands the opportunity to do well to save our own environment, the planet, to take the right decisions to bring humanity onto a good path.”

Climate change, human rights, new technology…

But will we take that path? When I first heard about GESDA, global warming was the issue I immediately thought about. Numerous eminent scientists had been documenting that for years before any politicians really woke up to the risks. How useful it might have been to sit down right at the start and run some (as it has turned out all too real) scenarios about what we could be facing, from rising sea levels, to melting glaciers, to catastrophic landslides and floods.

And then there is information technology, social media, AI. As Switzerland’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Jürg Lauber, told a recent GESDA debate, “Human rights, like every other field, are very much under the influence now of what is happening in technology and science.”

But just ten or 15 years ago, during the Arab Spring for example, social media was seen as a great liberator, a platform for ‘citizen journalists’ who could quickly share up-to-the minute information about major events. What has much of it become? A toxic mix of disinformation, conspiracy, misogyny and racism.

Apart from the European Union, which is risking a row with Washington over its Digital Services Act, there has been little political will to legislate over such risks and huge pushback from the tech giants when anyone tries. Surely we could have, as GESDA wants to do, anticipated the obscenity of a system like Grok allowing misogynist losers to humiliate women and girls before it actually happened?

…and weapons

Another area for GESDA, one which international Geneva has already spent time on, is weapons. As we have seen in both Ukraine and Gaza, semi‑autonomous weapons systems are already with us, and yet just a few short years ago, they seemed the stuff of science fiction. As UN director general Tatiana Valovaya told that debate, she had once been “absolutely sure there is a law that a robot can’t kill a human, that a robot can’t harm another human being. We are living in the situation where we…do not know how to really develop AI within the context of ethics, within the context of human rights.”

+ Switzerland aspires to build ‘human’ artificial intelligence

But do we still have time to anticipate the rapid changes – whether climate change or AI? Andersen admits that, in particular when it comes to new technology, “We don’t have any more that space between the moment we know it’s coming, and the moment it’s there, and therefore we don’t have that safe space to talk about what regulations we could have, because there is already a race going on.”

Still, she and her GESDA colleagues will continue. “Let’s take advantage of knowing what is coming to act on it now,” she told me, “and not be in reactive mode, not be in catch-up mode.”

I really hope we are not in catch-up mode. I really hope it’s not too late for an organisation like GESDA and not too late to develop sensible solutions to the many problems facing us. What do you think? Listen to Inside Geneva and let us know!