The agenda for the 2020 World Economic Forum

This year’s ongoing edition of the World Economic Forum addresses several major topics. Here, GOLDSTREET BUSINESS presents two presentations to this year’s Forum, around which two of those topics that are of intense relevance to Ghana – cybercrime and environmentally friendly business and consumer practices to curb climate change respectively – are being discussed.

4 things ISPs can do to reduce the impact of cybercrime

The role of internet service providers (ISP) in protecting critical national infrastructure cannot be ignored. As Saudi Telecom Company (stc) Group’s CEO Nasser Sulaiman Al Nasser stated during a recent cybersecurity conference: “Cyber-risk is a business issue. It is not the responsibility of one department. The safest businesses are the ones where everyone is aware, knowledgeable and vigilant.”

Every day, an average of 8,497 stc customers’ machines are actively infected by malware and an average of 13,000,000 requests for access to risky domains are initiated. All ISPs play a unique role in global online ecosystems – and in their privileged position as carriers of internet traffic, often have the ability to stop criminal behaviour at the source. They can also work with their customers and their significant supply chains in order to drive the adoption of good practice.

A group of global telecoms companies has been working with the World Economic Forum on an initiative which seeks to address cybercrime at its root and to protect consumers from high-volume online threats. Stc is delighted to have had the opportunity to collaborate on this initiative and in the development of the Principles for Internet Service Providers, which is being launched at this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

The principles we have developed seek to address some of the most indiscriminate high-volume crimes, such as phishing e-mails, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and the distribution of malware across unsuspecting users’ devices. The impact of these attacks is potentially significant. Phishing, smishing and social engineering attacks are now experienced by 85 percent of organizations, while stc Group comes under DDoS attack on average 70 times a day.

The principles set out four key ways in which telecoms operators can have an impact on reducing the impact of global cybercrime:

1) ISPs can make an impact by protecting their customers by default from known attacks and by collaborating with peers. This means that when ISPs see their networks being used to perpetrate criminal activity, they should act decisively to prevent the consequences from reaching their customers. The working group that developed the principles also recognized the importance of collaboration in defending against attacks. Sharing information about known threats can help stop criminals in their tracks and interrupt attempted attacks more swiftly.

2) ISPs have a role in raising awareness and improving understanding of how to respond to attacks, both across their customer bases and more broadly. Participants in the initiative highlighted many ways in which their companies and other bodies help to raise awareness and build skills. For its part, stc offers various measures to help customers protect themselves from online threats, from live monitoring centres to e-mail security tools.

3) ISPs have a role to play in driving good behaviour through their supply chains – in particular with vendors who provide hardware to consumers, which can often be an easy route through which to conduct an attack. Telecommunications infrastructure must also be shored up in order to avoid being compromised. Stc, like the other operators involved in this work, has a robust supply-chain management process to ensure each third-party supplier goes through strict security-related scrutiny, adheres to their cybersecurity requirements and undergoes cybersecurity audits.

4) The principles also identify more technical ways in which ISPs can help to prevent attacks that seek to undermine the very nature of internet protocols and the routing of online traffic. For this purpose, stc has adopted machine-learning methods to allow the real-time detection and prevention of fraudulent attempts against customers; the potential losses from fraud carried out on services provided by telecom and ISPs have been valued at US$32.7 billion annually.

Through the development of these principles we aim to raise awareness of the important active role that ISPs play in making life harder for cybercriminals and in securing global online ecosystems. We hope these principles will serve to generate a dialogue between service providers and governments on how the principles can be adopted in a transparent and consistent way around the world.

Currently the incentives for ISPs to act are not always aligned with financial and regulatory drivers. Ultimately, we seek to generate a debate at the most senior levels around how ISPs can activate their privileged positions to make a real difference to online security and to make life harder for cybercriminals and reducing the benefits of malicious perpetration.

What is the World Economic Forum doing on cybersecurity

The World Economic Forum Platform for Shaping the Future of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust aims to spearhead global cooperation and collective responses to growing cyber challenges, ultimately to harness and safeguard the full benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The platform seeks to deliver impact through facilitating the creation of security-by-design and security-by-default solutions across industry sectors, developing policy frameworks where needed; encouraging broader cooperative arrangements and shaping global governance; building communities to successfully tackle cyber challenges across the public and private sectors; and impacting agenda setting, to elevate some of the most pressing issues.

Platform activities focus on three main challenges:

Strengthening Global Cooperation for Digital Trust and Security – to increase global cooperation between the public and private sectors in addressing key challenges to security and trust posed by a digital landscape currently lacking effective cooperation at legal and policy levels, effective market incentives, and cooperation between stakeholders at the operational level across the ecosystem. Securing Future Digital Networks and Technology – to identify cybersecurity challenges and opportunities posed by new technologies and accelerate solutions and incentives to ensure digital trust in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Building Skills and Capabilities for the Digital Future – to coordinate and promote initiatives to address the global deficit in professional skills, effective leadership and adequate capabilities in the cyber domain.

The platform is working on a number of ongoing activities to meet these challenges. Current initiatives include our successful work with a range of public- and private-sector partners to develop a clear and coherent cybersecurity vision for the electricity industry in the form of Board Principles for managing cyber risk in the electricity ecosystem and a complete framework, created in collaboration with the Forum’s investment community, enabling investors to assess the security preparedness of target companies, contributing to raising internal cybersecurity awareness.

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The world needs a circular economy. Help us make it happen

By Frans van Houten Chief Executive Officer, Royal Philips & Naoko Ishii Chief Executive Officer and Chairperson, Global Environment Facility

• The circular economy could be a $4.5 trillion business opportunity.
• Only 9% of the global economy is circular at present.
• The Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy is helping to speed this transition.

As policy-makers worldwide respond to a rising tide of climate activism and extreme weather events, the concept of the circular economy has become a key lever in the climate action tool kit.

Around 50% of the world’s current greenhouse gas emissions result from the extraction and processing of natural resources, with demand for raw materials under a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario predicted to double by 2050. Indeed, the general public is increasingly interested in the concept and its importance in preserving life on Earth. As we enter the decade to deliver on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate action, there is an emerging consensus that circular economy solutions are critical to achieving those goals by the 2030 deadline. Business-as-usual is not an option.

Fortunately, businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of going circular – a global growth opportunity valued by Accenture at US$4.5 trillion over the next decade. CEOs are receiving detailed shareholder questions regarding their circular strategies, specialized private investment funds are being launched dedicated to circular companies, and public-private partnerships are being established to catalyse circular government and private-sector strategies.

We urgently need to translate this awareness into action. The latest Circularity Gap report from  Circular Economy reveals that, faced with the twin headwinds of increased CO2 emissions and increased resource extraction, the global economy is only 8.6% circular. Just two years ago it was 9.1%. The global circularity gap is therefore widening. This is a major concern because of the pressure that natural resource extraction could exert on biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, large-scale involuntary migration and failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, as detailed in the latest World Economic Forum Global Risks Report.

With less than 10 years tp prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees centigrade and only 10 years to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is critical to bring together leaders across industry, government and civil society to shift the global economy more aggressively toward circularity. The Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE) has grown quickly and has emerged as an important action hub and engine for change. With more than 70 leaders and 20 communities from across the public and private sectors, PACE has become the place to ensure that good words turn into positive actions at scale.

PACE organizes its strategic activities around four key thematic areas where the circular economy has the greatest potential – electronics and capital equipment, plastics, fashion and textiles, and food and agriculture. PACE has also established a dedicated workstream that addresses cross-cutting system challenges that can unlock scale, including meaningful metrics, business models, innovation (such as the World Economic Forum’s Scale 360initiative) and regional networks (such as the African Circular Economy Alliance and Latin-American & Caribbean Circular Economy Coalition).

In working with international organizations, including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the Ellen McArthur Foundation, PACE is underscoring the importance of moving towards a common set of metrics to accurately measure global progress towards the circular economy. While these initiatives focus on company metrics, PACE supports Circle Economy’s annual Circularity Gap report as a key measure of global and regional progress.

The need for strengthened metrics and natural resource targets to accelerate innovation and more effectively track progress towards a circular economy is emphasized in a joint paper from the International Resource Panel, the World Economic Forum and PACE published earlier this year.

Based on insights from the PACE community and relevant external stakeholders, we have defined the key topics to focus on within the four strategic themes outlined above with the aim of scaling PACE’s global impact. For 2020, we are driving forward a number of key initiatives, including the following:

• The PACE Capital Equipment Coalition will publish a new learning document, including a new transparent reporting mechanism, to help scale up equipment take-back and recycling/repurposing programmes. The Coalition is also looking to expand by adding a new group of companies based out of North America.
• PACE will continue to build on its 2019 work and establish a blended finance Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO) to handle e-waste in Nigeria as part of an extended producer responsibility (EPR) system, funded in part by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through the United Nations Environment Programme. Testing this system will allow PACE to scale up EPR systems in other countries across the African continent, achieving scale and impact.
• In alignment with PACE’s affiliate initiative, the Global Plastic Action Partnership, national and municipal action plans will be created through funding from the GEF, multilateral development bank investment and bilateral government support.

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BOX

What is a circular economy?

The global population is expected to reach close to 9 billion people by 2030 – inclusive of 3 billion new middle-class consumers This places unprecedented pressure on natural resources to meet future consumer demand.

A circular economy is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the end-of-life concept with restoration, shifts towards the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems and business models.

Nothing that is made in a circular economy becomes waste, moving away from our current linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy. The circular economy’s potential for innovation, job creation and economic development is huge: estimates indicate a trillion-dollar opportunity.

None of this will happen without people – thought leaders, business leaders, politicians, policy-makers, innovators, entrepreneurs and NGO staff with the vision, commitment and determination to make sure we use the world’s natural resources in sustainable and climate-friendly ways. PACE is already a formidable force for change, but we urgently need to harmonize existing efforts and scale up best-practice circular economy solutions to make a truly global impact. We encourage you to join PACE in replacing the business-as-usual model that threatens our very existence on the planet with circular solutions that offer real hope and prosperity for the future.

Source: goldstreetbusiness.com