Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Davos: some images from the World Resources Forum 2013


Some photos from the World Resources Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland, Oct 6-9 2013. This set of photos has no pretense of being exhaustive, just a few snapshots that I took when I could


To start, here is yours truly (Ugo Bardi), giving his presentation on the first day of the meeting. The image is a rather famous graphic, originally made by David Murphy. You can read the details of my presentation in this post. (photo by Francesca Galeazzi)




Solitaire Townsend giving her talk. She has been incredibly brave in showing up to an audience of bespectacled and betied professionals with a talk titled "The Naked Environmentalist: how sex will save us" (!!). But her seminar turned out to be an extremely interesting discussion on the importance of social networks and on how to use advertising techniques in order to pass the message on sustainability.


One of the slides presented by Micheal Dittmar - physicist at the ETH Zurich. He is correctly very critical about how the concept of "sustainable development" - noting how, despite all the noise and the many conferences, it didn't bring to the world anything concrete.



Francesca Galeazzi giving her presentation. She works at ARUP in Shanghai, and her talk was about the quantification of the advantages of sustainable buildings. It is a difficult subject in China where, apparently, the need of sustainable buildings is still not well understood.




Rolf Widmer, ETH Zurich, leading a seminar on automotive recycling. 


One of the results of the discussion at the panel chaired by Rolf Widmer. It is not easy to recycle old cars - but we tried to find ways. 



Scientific meetings often offer prizes for the best papers - they don't usually pay attention to the worst ones. However, if there is a best paper, there has to be the worst one. About the World Resource Forum in Davos 2013, I propose as a purely personal nomination this poster for the worst paper not just of this meeting but perhaps in absolute terms, the worst paper I've ever seen. 



One of the several panel discussions at the meeting. Yours truly is participating in this one.


To conclude, what would a conference be without a conference dinner? Here it is!



Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome, faculty member of the University of Florence, and the author of "Extracted" (Chelsea Green 2014), "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017), and Before the Collapse (Springer 2019)