Frozen toothpaste and a warming planet: why we camped out in Davos

[This article was first published in THE and is re-published here with permission]

It’s warm enough inside the sleeping bag even at −17°C, but it’s painful to crawl out, struggle into cold clothes and dodge the tumble of snow on opening the tent door. Trudging over to the washroom, it’s discovering your toothpaste has frozen solid overnight that underlines that this is definitely Davos With A Difference.

The Global Elite™ have gathered here each January for more than half a century to ponder great thoughts, strike deals and party the nights away. JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon said that the World Economic Forum is where billionaires tell millionaires what the middle class is thinking. Given academic salary levels, what business does a university manager have on the magic mountain?

The University of Exeter works with Arctic Basecamp, a brilliant initiative by my colleague Gail Whiteman, Professor of Sustainability at the University of Exeter Business School, which aims to speak science to power. A group of young researchers and activists pitch camp outside the Schatzalp Hotel and entice business and political leaders across to engage them with the reality of climate change, using virtual reality headsets to take them across changing polar landscapes, describing the tipping points that risk a cascade into catastrophe and the positive systemic actions that can bring us back from the brink.

Generously, the team welcomed me to camp with them, although I’m double their average age. I’m a misfit in another way: I’m not myself an academic. After the sale of my tech business 18 months ago, I got a call from Exeter’s Vice-Chancellor, Lisa Roberts. She was not, as I suspected, seeking a donation, but, instead, had a proposition: come and help turn research into reality; translate the university’s work into impact. Since Lisa’s arrival in 2020, Exeter has a redefined strategy to create a sustainable, healthy and socially just future – to contribute to making the world greener, healthier, fairer. That can only be achieved by working with businesses, civil society and governments, influencing policy and putting discoveries into production.

The “greener” part of that mission is clearly the most urgent. Improving health and social justice will be an enduring task; addressing global warming is a race against a fast-ticking clock. Exeter has more than 1,500 people working on climate and environmental science, including more of the top 100 climate scientists in Reuters’ ranking than any other university in the world. Ensuring science drives decision-making is a vital task; it’s why we and so many other institutions engage in the COP conference and why I was in that tent on the Schatzalp with my frozen toothpaste.

Davos is an odd environment. The roads are clogged with a long snake of black Mercedes carrying Masters of the Universe apparently unaware they’d reach their session on the future of AI faster if they got out and walked. The shops are turned into showrooms for banks and consultancies, creating an unnerving parallel reality. And there are, I think, valid criticisms of the WEF meeting: compared with the truly global feel of COP, at Davos it’s not just the snow that’s noticeably white.

It’s also, though, unquestionably a place of influence. It’s where Greece and Turkey signed the Davos Declaration in 1988 agreeing not to fight each other. It’s where Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk first appeared together in public in 1992. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, Gavi, was born there in 2000, and it’s where a good chunk of the world’s most influential business leaders, politicians and financiers form their priorities. If we want academic work to achieve impact, if we want to change the world, then taking our message to the places where decisions are made is essential.

The encampment of polar expedition tents provides visual symbolism of Arctic science and seems to intrigue delegates, tempting them in and enabling the team to engage them. For me, there was also a more prosaic reason for camping out: a hotel room in Davos for WEF-week costs something around a student’s annual fees. There would be symbolism of a different kind in that level of expenditure.

Across the week, we made our case to a few hundred delegates, ranging from bona fide billionaires to hard-pressed policymakers. Members of the Arctic Basecamp team take a creative approach to getting the message across, handing out “endangered chocolate” to highlight the risks to food production and staging Bach and ballet in the snow to attract those disinclined to attend a serious seminar – slipping the key messages into the opening and closing speeches.

Given the challenges facing the sector, it’s inevitable that universities will increasingly focus on commercial activity to fund both research and education. It would be a grave error, though, to view business engagement solely, or even primarily, through the lens of monetary benefit. Financial strength is a prerequisite for universities to fulfil their purposes, but it should not be an objective in itself. The prime reason to partner with industry is that it’s essential we do so to achieve our missions: licensing drugs so they go into production, providing degree apprenticeships to broaden access to opportunity and building an economy that works to reduce emissions and abate climate change.

Working with leading academics on critical issues is an incredible privilege, one I hadn’t expected. Seeing their work magnified through the right partnerships, addressing the most serious challenges we face collectively, is a greater one. That’s why we went to Davos, and that’s why we’ll continue speaking science to power.

Next time, though, I’ll know to keep my toothpaste in the sleeping bag.