It was the 50th meeting of the World Economic Forum this year, which was launched by German economist Klaus Schwab. The conference is used to hold meetings, make business deals or to try and impact the global agenda. The meeting this year runs from January 21 – 24, 2020. Sustainability and climate change are top issues at this year’s Davos meeting.

Greta Thunberg found herself on the stage at the World Economic Forum last week to confront world leaders for doing “basically nothing” to reduce carbon emission and tackle the climate crisis despite the evidence presented by Thunberg and all activists protesting climate change. 

Thunberg repeated her call for all companies, banks, institutions, and governments to abandon the fossil fuel economy.

Thunberg told the world’s political and financial elite that even with the spike in awareness of the climate crisis, not much had been done to make a change. Social media and protesting cannot fully make the change that we need to tackle the climate crisis that is our present day. World leaders and corporate business owners need to be willing to make conscious and productive changes into their environmental footprints.

“Thunberg said she’s spent a year trying to publicize the findings of a 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that shows countries can only release another 420 gigatons of carbon dioxide in order to have the best chance at keeping the rise in global temperatures to under 1.5 degrees. At current levels, that amount will be emitted within roughly eight and a half years” reported Hadas Gold for CNN Business.

“Pretty much nothing has been done since the global emissions of CO2 has not reduced,” Thunberg said. “If you see it from that aspect, what has concretely been done, if you see it from a bigger perspective, basically nothing … it will require much more than this, this is just the very beginning,” said Thunberg. When asked what she wanted to see in the future, Thunberg said “that we start listening to the science and that we actually start treating this crisis as the crisis it is.”

In his speech, President Trump announced that the United States would be joining an initiative to restoring a trillion trees by 2050, but said that “to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse.”

Speaking again shortly after Trump, Thunberg said “planting trees is good” but nowhere near enough. “Immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels. We don’t want these things done by 2050, or 2030 or even 2021 — we want this done now,” Thunberg said.