WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
FROM THE EDITOR
LAST MONTH, I WAS IN BOSTON FOR THE presentation of the Earthshot Prize, the annual awards started by Prince William designed to help accelerate creative solutions to the climate crisis. The roughly $6 million in grants—supported by donors including TIME’s owners Marc and Lynne Benioff—went to five remarkable projects, from a technology that turns carbon into rock to biodegradable seaweed-based packaging for consumer goods (called Notpla for “not plastics”). At a gathering after the ceremony, I was struck by the remarks of Earthshot board chair Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, who framed this moment in the planet’s 4.5 billion years (no small task!) as one in which “the pen of history has been passed from nature to humanity.”
I asked Figueres if she would adapt those comments for TIME’s annual Davos partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which appears in this issue. Until fairly recently, she notes in the resulting essay, we were passive subjects of nature’s reign. Today, it is the reverse. “More than at any other time in the history of human presence on this planet, we are now deciding what our own future will be,” Figueres writes, in a theme that echoes throughout our coverage.
TIME SENIOR CORRESPONDENT Justin Worland, for his part, takes us to India—from the coal mines of Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest and most polluted states, to the wind turbines and solar fields of Rajasthan 900 miles away and a world apart. The tension between current needs for fossil fuels and renewable energy is hardly unique to India. But as Justin writes, given India’s size and virtually insatiable demand for energy, “where that balance is struck could tip the climate scales worldwide.”
We are at a critical juncture too for the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and nowhere is that more evident than in the emergence of artificial intelligence into the mainstream. While many of us spent our holidays generating AI poetry on ChatGPT, TIME’s Billy Perrigo has bee
