Our work

The World Economic Forum’s current strategy outlines a more focused and streamlined approach to its initiatives, communities and insights. Strengthening capabilities and upgrading its operating model will allow the Forum to accelerate execution and maximize value for stakeholders. By aligning around unified strategic priorities, the Forum helps stakeholders unlock new economic opportunities, enhance societal well-being and accelerate the transition to nature-positive, future-ready systems.

The Forum’s work focuses on five interconnected themes where foresight, dialogue and collaboration are most needed.

Humanity is entering a period of profound transformation that will influence not only economies and labour markets, but the future relationship between people, technology and society. Ensuring that this transformation serves humanity rather than outpaces it is one of the defining challenges of the age.

The Forum brings together leaders to navigate these shifts and support more inclusive, resilient societies.

The Forum engages businesses, governments and civil society – across industries and geographies – to inform the jobs of tomorrow and promote good jobs for all. Through the Future of Jobs Initiative, the Forum addresses labour market disruptions, technology- and energy-led job transitions, and emerging industry talent needs.

As part of this work, the initiative produces insights, including its flagship Future of Jobs Report, designed to equip leaders with the insights and knowledge needed to navigate and respond to the changing world of work and its outlook.

Alongside its insights, the initiative provides frameworks, tools, opportunities for strategic dialogue and peer exchange, and a platform for collaboration. In March 2026, more than 30 chief people officers came together to discuss global workforce trends affecting people across industries and geographies.

By mapping and charting a pathway to the jobs of tomorrow, the initiative identifies strategies to accelerate the creation of high-quality jobs. It pilots and scales solutions, supports collective action and mobilizes a coalition of champions to expand access to quality employment.

By 2035, 7.8 million manufacturing jobs are forecast to go unfilled.

In response, the Forum launched SmartStart at the 2026 Annual Meeting, designed to prepare one million students in the US for entry-level roles in modern manufacturing and supply chain careers by 2035.

Co-created by over 50 leaders across industry, government, academia and labour, SmartStart underlines the need for collective action to build a future-ready workforce. The initiative has three areas of focus: future-ready education, learning that leads to jobs and enhanced visibility of technical careers.

The initiative is being introduced through pilot schools for students aged 14–18 in selected regions throughout the US during 2026 and 2027. This year, the Forum has collaborated with a network of stakeholders to deliver the three-year catalogue of curricula and pilots. These will help test and refine the programme’s components using tangible examples.

The pilots are designed to demonstrate how education can keep pace with manufacturing’s evolving needs, integrating academic learning with practical exposure to the technologies, tools and processes used in modern industry.

As sectors, jobs and skills evolve, new leaders are emerging to lead the transition. In January 2026, the Forum’s Global Future Council on Leadership released its first publication, Next Generation Leadership for a World in Transformation: Driving Dialogue and Action. This introduced a systemic approach to rewiring the foundations of leadership by rethinking the pipeline, skills development, decision-making and long-term legacy of leaders.

In addition, at the 2026 Annual Meeting, the Forum launched Youth Pulse 2026: Insights From the Next Generation for a Changing World, a major report on youth perspectives. Drawing on insights from nearly 4,600 young people across 489 cities worldwide, the report mapped the next generation’s priorities across five dimensions: political, economic, social, technological and environmental, while highlighting how young people are not only navigating uncertainty, but actively reimagining systems and solutions for the future.

Healthcare systems and providers face three key challenges: the increasing burden of chronic diseases, inequitable outcomes and access, and resource constraints driven by rising costs and a healthcare workforce crisis.

To address these, the Digital Healthcare Transformation initiative accelerates the responsible digital transformation of healthcare ecosystems globally. It promotes public-private action across industries, sectors and regions to support holistic AI- and data-enabled solutions. These are aimed at increasing efficiencies, expanding access and improving overall outcomes.

Digital transformation offers an opportunity to improve health and save lives. It can give patients greater control over their care, expand access to healthcare and support more intelligent, efficient health systems.

The initiative is structured around three workstreams. The first convenes a global public-private community to share evidence and best practice. The second builds and connects regional coalitions and global examples that address specific healthcare challenges. The third translates these learnings and examples into multi-sector policy and enabling conditions across key jurisdictions, including the US, Europe and Asia.

Lasting prosperity depends on inclusive, sustainable and resilient growth that creates opportunities for people while strengthening economies and societies. The Forum convenes leaders to explore new drivers of growth, from innovation and technology to trade, investment and entrepreneurship. By promoting collaboration across sectors and regions, it helps identify practical pathways to greater productivity, competitiveness and shared prosperity.

The Scenarios for the Global Economy Dialogue Series provides business leaders with a space for peer-level, cross-industry discussion on key economic developments, interconnected risks and their implications for strategy, investment decisions and resilience.

Throughout 2025–2026, more than 120 chief executive officers (CEOs), ministers, C-suite executives and experts participated in more than 15 sessions, including key dialogues at the 2026 Annual Meeting and at the Industry Strategy Meeting 2026. These sessions explored possible economic futures and mapped implications for their industries. This led to the publication of three cross-industry-led white papers, focused respectively on scenarios for geoeconomics and technology in 2030, AI and talent in 2030, and energy and competitiveness in 2035.

The Four Futures for the New Economy: Geoeconomics and Technology in 2030 white paper explored how the interplay between geopolitics and technology is influencing global economic systems and informed a high-level dialogue at the 2026 Annual Meeting with more than 60 global CEOs and policy-makers.

In a rapidly changing global economy, investing in capital markets can help individuals grow their wealth over the long term, offering opportunities beyond traditional savings. It also gives people greater agency over their financial futures, helping them build wealth to meet long-term goals and cultivate financial resilience.

Reflecting this, the Global Retail Investing initiative aims to understand and reduce gaps in trust and access for individuals within capital markets, broaden financial education and access, and help develop a responsible retail investor ecosystem.

These focus areas address the new reality in global market activity. Once dominated by institutional players, the market now includes a large and rapidly growing number of individual investors, many facing barriers to participation, gaps in their financial education and an increasingly complex range of financial products.

The initiative convenes public- and private-sector stakeholders to address these three areas in support of long-term individual financial well-being. During the reporting period, the initiative expanded its survey to 25 markets and more than 30,000 respondents. This came in response to continued rising retail investor participation, particularly among Gen Z, with 72% investing by the time they enter the workforce.

As Europe continues to build an innovation-focused environment that unlocks long-term growth, productivity and resilience, the Forum launched the multistakeholder group, Leaders for European Growth and Competitiveness. Comprising leaders from the public and private sectors, civil society and key organizations, the group supports progress on competitiveness-enhancing reforms.

The group prioritizes four productivity-related concerns for Europe: improving conditions for innovation; advancing emerging technologies, clean and affordable energy, and industrial systems; expanding financial services offerings and access; and strengthening trade and investment partnerships globally.

The initiative was launched at the European institutions’ headquarters in Brussels, bringing together more than 70 high-level leaders for dialogues with the President of the European Commission, the President of the European Parliament, the President of the European Council and several commissioners.

The initiative has since grown to more than 100 members and has convened senior delegates in Copenhagen and Dublin around its four thematic pillars, in collaboration with Danish and Irish political leadership. In June 2026, German Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz co-hosted a meeting of the group in Berlin, bringing together prominent CEOs, commissioners and experts to review progress and maintain momentum.

Mineral supply chains are vital to modern existence and the global economy. The Securing Minerals for Energy and Technologies initiative aims to strengthen the resilience of these supply chains. It promotes responsible development, mobilizes finance and supports increased investment across regions.

One of the initiative’s key aims is to elevate regional opportunities. It promotes economic value creation beyond mineral extraction and aligns investment and policy strategies with the context and challenges of each region.

While minerals are now understood to be foundational to economic security, there is an annual investment gap of $200 billion, largely driven by financing risks. To address this issue and mobilize investment, the financing community under the initiative – representing approximately $30 trillion of assets under management across 60 organizations – developed global principles to de-risk and mobilize financing in mineral value chains as set out in the Making Critical Minerals Bankable: Policy Tools to Unlock Investment white paper.

During 2025, the initiative expanded global collaboration to help strengthen mineral supply resilience, unlock capital and drive economic growth. With a focus on Africa, it entered into a seven-month partnership with the Development Bank of Southern Africa and convened more than 130 regional stakeholders in Johannesburg.

The initiative’s Securing Minerals for the Energy Transition: Finance for Southern Africa white paper identified both financing barriers and practical solutions for scaling critical mineral value chains in the region. In turn, this work informed B20, a Forum collaboration that resulted in a joint virtual workshop and participation in the B20 summit in South Africa.

At the local level, Yes/Cities mobilizes investment to unlock local innovation and opportunity. It brings together government, innovators, investors and companies to align city priorities with capital and expertise, turning innovative ideas into tangible impact.

Every year, more than $3 trillion is invested in research, development and innovation, yet fewer than 1% of early pilots develop into something larger. Yes/Cities changes this dynamic by accelerating breakthrough solutions, removing implementation barriers and advancing progress that strengthens local and regional economies and enhances the places where people live, work and play.

During the reporting period, the Forum launched the Yes/Cities Global Network, connecting 18 innovation ecosystems across six regions, representing more than 150 million people and $8 trillion in economic output.

In Bengaluru and Boston, cross-sector coalitions advanced shared local priorities: sustainable infrastructure and mobility in Bengaluru, and food systems innovation in Boston.

In San Francisco, Yes/SF has convened over 65 collaborators, mobilized $60 million, supported more than 55 innovators and hosted over 200 events since its launch. The initiative was also formally integrated into the city’s Climate Action Plan.

At a time of geopolitical and societal shifts, long-held assumptions are being challenged, underscoring the need for new mechanisms for collaboration.

The Forum provides an impartial, trusted platform for dialogue and cooperation in this era of geopolitical fragmentation. It helps leaders make sense of global shifts, strengthen resilience and identify pathways towards shared stability and opportunity.

The Forum’s Global Risks Initiative monitors risk perception and analysis, encourages dialogue and peer exchange and provides foresight through its work with experts, trend analysis, scenarios and horizon scanning. The aim is to uncover blind spots in risk perception and anticipate emerging and future risks.

As part of the initiative, a Global Risks Consortium seeks solutions to build greater resilience against economic, environmental, geopolitical and technological trends.

The initiative’s Chief Risk Officers’ Community works together to strengthen risk officers’ capacity to respond to current and future shocks and adapt business strategies. From this emerges the Chief Risk Officers’ Outlook, which consolidates the community’s views. Also published annually is the Global Risks Report, now in its 21st edition, which has sat at the forefront of strategic decision-making for almost 20 years.

The Global Risks Report 2026 identified uncertainty as the defining theme of the year’s outlook. Its findings informed a high-level dialogue at the 2026 Annual Meeting, convening more than 40 global CEOs and policy-makers.

Focusing on the risks and opportunities around geopolitics and trade, the Chief Geopolitical Executives’ Community convenes executives to explore the effects of shifting geopolitical and geoeconomic trends on industries, supply chains and markets.

Its purpose is to help develop stronger dialogue between executives and experts; create a platform on which to share concerns, best practice and questions; and forge a community among senior geopolitical executives.

The rapidly changing geopolitical context is introducing new uncertainties for businesses as they navigate complex security and economic developments.

In March 2026, the Chief Geopolitical Executives' Community partnered with the Atlantic Council to convene a timely discussion about the new geopolitics of energy. The discussion explored developments in the Middle East and their implications for energy markets and systems, how energy considerations are influencing geopolitics and how geopolitical shifts are redefining energy strategies.

In response to the changing global landscape, the Humanitarian and Resilience Investing Initiative brings together public, private and humanitarian stakeholders to unlock social impact investment in frontier markets, defined as fragile, developing or crisis-affected markets and communities.

Traditional and acute relief efforts remain necessary in crisis situations, but should be complemented by a market-based response that unlocks investment opportunities aimed at the resilience and recovery of affected or at-risk communities.

Protracted crises, as well as growing challenges such as climate disasters and the effects of reductions in official development assistance, have exacerbated the need for more sustainable responses.

This initiative mobilizes capital to scale market-driven solutions that measurably benefit and increase the resilience of communities. By pursuing a cross-sectoral approach, there is greater potential to unlock financially sustainable business models.

To date, the initiative has engaged more than 100 partners. Key meetings in Geneva took place in October 2025 and June 2026, bringing together leaders from across the initiative to discuss practical solutions and opportunities to scale private investment in frontier markets.

Global supply chains are also undergoing a profound transformation. The model built around low costs and large scale in an era of globalization is giving way to a more competitive, constrained and unpredictable landscape, which is, in turn, increasing risks and costs.

The Future-Proofing Global Value Chains initiative helps business and government leaders navigate the reconfiguration of global value chains to build greater resilience, agility and competitive advantage. It equips the manufacturing and supply chain community with the tools and insights needed to anticipate emerging shifts, respond to disruption and design next-generation resilience strategies and industrial policies.

The initiative continuously examines how companies are adapting their supply chain strategies in practice, including shifts towards greater coordination across supplier networks, increased optionality and more decentralized operating models.

Through the Manufacturing and Supply Chain Readiness Navigator, the initiative also helps leaders monitor country-level preparedness across key factors to inform footprint, investment and reform decisions.

Finally, the initiative supports governments to develop concrete policy levers to strengthen industrial readiness and build competitive ecosystems, alongside regional deep dives that explore specific value-chain opportunities, constraints and partnerships.

In January 2026, the initiative released its annual report, Global Value Chains Outlook 2026: Orchestrating Corporate and National Agility, which offered actionable insights for companies seeking greater agility amid structural volatility and for governments aiming to create favourable environments for manufacturing and supply chain investment and operations.

Helping inform this work, the Forum’s global Chief Operating, Supply Chain and Procurement Officers Community is a critical advisory group comprising more than 100 C-suite leaders across 18 industries grounded in translating strategic vision into operational reality.

Technology is becoming a defining force in economic growth, competitiveness and societal change. As AI and other emerging technologies transform how people live, work and create value, the challenge is to accelerate innovation while ensuring its benefits are widely shared and its risks effectively managed.

The Forum brings together leaders to support the responsible development and deployment of technology. Through its work on AI, frontier technologies, cyber resilience and digital governance, it helps build the frameworks, capabilities and partnerships needed to ensure technology advances prosperity, resilience and human progress.

The Technology Convergence Initiative explores how emerging technologies are intersecting, combining and accelerating together, unlocking entirely new capabilities, operating models and value creation across industries and society.

AI increasingly acts as a connective layer across these domains – the common thread running through combinations from cognitive robotics to autonomous labs – linking technologies that once advanced on separate trajectories and accelerating how fast they mature and scale together.

As the technology landscape becomes increasingly interconnected, leaders need better tools to understand individual technologies and evaluate how they interact and amplify one another. The initiative helps decision-makers identify where advanced technologies are converging and how these intersections can strengthen competitiveness, industries and economic systems. This supports more informed strategy, investment and policy decisions.

As part of the initiative, the team released its second major report, Technology Convergence: The New Logic for Competitive Advantage. The report examines how organizations translate technology convergence from technical promise to operational impact, drawing on examples from healthcare, manufacturing, energy, life sciences and human–machine interaction. It shows how convergence transforms value chains, shifts bottlenecks and changes where value, power and risk sit across industries and networks.

The initiative also maintains the Tech Maturity Index, which maps the maturity of 246 frontier technology subcomponents across emerging technology domains. By providing a view of technology readiness, the index helps inform analysis of how frontier technologies may combine, mature and shape industries and technology networks.

The transformations that industries are undergoing may unlock efficiency gains, but they also introduce significant cyber risks. To address these challenges, the Cyber Resilience Initiative develops forward-looking solutions and promotes effective practices to enhance cyber resilience throughout industry ecosystems.

Geopolitical uncertainty, cyber inequity and rapidly developing technology are also creating challenges for building and maintaining cyber resilience.

The initiative promotes collaboration between the public and private sectors to strengthen cyber resilience. Specifically, it raises awareness and develops guidance to support decision-makers navigating cybersecurity challenges. It also helps co-create solutions and inform regulation that embeds cyber resilience.

As part of its work, the initiative released the Cyber Resilience Compass during the reporting period. This tool is designed to scale solutions and share practical insights among industries and geographies.

In October 2025, the Forum organized workshops at the Global Cybersecurity Forum Annual Meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, including the session “Measuring Cyber Resilience: From Insight to Action”, which looked at the need to measure cyber resilience as a foundation for improvement.

The initiative also helps develop tailored insights and tools for specific industries. During the reporting period, it focused on oil and gas, electricity, transport, and supply chains.

At the forefront of these rapid technological shifts is the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network, which consists of 23 independent national and thematic centres across Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East.

The centres aim to advance responsible technology adoption, ensuring that emerging technologies deliver societal benefits while minimizing risks. To achieve this, the network uses public-private collaboration, pilots and partnerships, and links global priorities with local action.

At the 2026 Annual Meeting, the Forum launched five new centres, including two in the United Arab Emirates, with the others located in France, India and the United Kingdom. Their focus areas include AI innovation, cyber resilience, the energy transition and frontier technologies.

Climate and nature are no longer environmental issues alone; they are increasingly central to economic growth, resilience and security.

The Forum convenes leaders across sectors and regions to accelerate climate and nature action while supporting economic development. By encouraging collaboration, mobilizing capital and advancing practical solutions, it helps drive progress towards a more sustainable, resilient and prosperous future.

To mark the “Year of Water” in 2026, the Forum turned Davos blue at the Annual Meeting, bringing its work on freshwater, ocean and the blue economy together under the banner of “Blue Davos”.

As an ongoing priority, the Forum’s work connects the full water cycle, positioning water stewardship as critical infrastructure for economic prosperity, food systems, global stability and climate resilience. It convenes leaders to spur progress in three critical areas: freshwater access and management, blue food security, and ocean protection.

During the 2026 Annual Meeting, the Forum launched the Accelerating Critical Transformations for the Ocean (ACT Ocean) initiative, which supports companies in identifying ocean-related risks and managing opportunities that conserve and restore ocean health while building economic resilience.

The Forum also announced the Blue Food Innovation Hub in Ghana, which strengthens skills, improves standards and traceability, and accelerates the adoption of innovations in areas such as sustainable feed and fish health management. Through this, the hub team hopes to create a model that can be adopted elsewhere in Africa.

As part of its freshwater work, the CEO Alliance on Nature held its inaugural meeting with 40 cross-industry CEOs from the agrifood, materials and water sectors, and collectively endorsed a strategy for global water resilience through finance, technology and basin partnerships.

UpLink is the Forum’s early-stage innovation engine. It connects purpose-driven innovators with the partnerships, resources and capital needed to advance solutions for resilient and sustainable economies. During the reporting period, participating ventures collectively raised $858 million. Among repeat-funded ventures, funding increased by 53%. These ventures also reported impact outcomes for the planet, including 4.3 billion litres of wastewater treated, 167,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions avoided or reduced and 327,000 tonnes of waste reduced or collected.

Industries around the world are facing a profound transformation driven by growing geopolitical uncertainty, resource constraints, energy pressures and the need to strengthen long-term competitiveness and resilience.

In this context, circularity and decarbonization are increasingly converging as complementary industrial strategies, helping businesses reduce material and energy dependencies, strengthen supply chains, accelerate innovation and unlock new sources of economic growth.

The Forum has played a leading role in advancing circular economy solutions globally through initiatives such as the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP), which is now the world’s largest initiative dedicated to tackling plastic pollution. Through its network of 25 National Plastic Action Partnerships, collectively reaching 20% of the global population, GPAP continued to scale up country-led action on plastic pollution, including the launch of seven new National Plastic Action Roadmaps across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Building on this momentum, the Forum launched Circular Economy Transformation to accelerate the scale-up of circular solutions across industries and national economies. The initiative connects the key enablers needed to advance circularity, including AI and emerging technologies, collaboration across value chains and sectors, and public-private partnerships at global and national levels. With only 6.9% of materials currently cycled back into the global economy, expanding circular practices could unlock $4.5 trillion in additional economic output and generate 6–8 million jobs globally by 2030, while strengthening competitiveness, resilience and resource security.

The Forum also continued pursuing these objectives through the First Movers Coalition (FMC). The FMC, a global public-private partnership launched in 2021, works with more than 100 corporate members across seven hard-to-abate sectors, currently accounting for 25% of global emissions, to future-proof their operations. The FMC now represents $19 billion in demand for clean solutions, helping accelerate the adoption of low-carbon industrial technologies globally. During the reporting period, Brazil and Spain joined the coalition, bringing the total to 15 government partners. In addition, the FMC welcomed three new corporate members, including its first Chinese company – an important milestone for engagement in the world’s largest manufacturing economy.