Insights

Businesses can make sustainability measurable and attractive to investors by integrating it into leadership accountability, ethical culture, and digital resilience. Linking executive incentives to long-term sustainable performance aligns management decisions with lasting value creation. Embedding sustainability into governance ensures transparency and priority beyond isolated initiatives. Cultivating an ethical culture strengthens decision-making, risk management, and stakeholder trust, especially during crises. Additionally, robust cybersecurity has become a core governance concern, with effective digital resilience signaling management quality and organizational preparedness. Demonstrating measurable sustainability outcomes through these mechanisms enhances investor confidence and long-term business resilience.
Health, Financial services
Three ways businesses can make sustainability measurable
Scientific research is increasingly pressured to compete for attention in an information economy dominated by immediacy and spectacle, often overshadowing careful, foundational work. Traditional public funding is dwindling, particularly for basic science, pushing researchers toward private investors who prioritize quick, transformative returns over long-term impact. This shift encourages exaggerated claims and hype, exemplified by viral but misleading videos like the fruit fly brain simulation, which can erode public trust and distort funding priorities. To safeguard scientific integrity, there is a need for balanced funding, responsible communication, rigorous peer review, and education that promotes transparency and manages expectations about scientific progress.
Financial services, Education, Health
What viral fly-brain videos reveal about science in the attention economy
Denmark offers more generous and equitable parental leave than the UK, with nontransferable "use it or lose it" leave encouraging fathers' active involvement. Danish policies, including higher childcare subsidies, lead to higher maternal employment and shared infant care, though mothers still handle most night wakings. Cultural practices like outdoor napping of babies, uncommon in the UK, are believed in Denmark to boost immune health and improve sleep. High social trust in Denmark supports such customs. These factors contribute to perceptions of calmer Danish babies and highlight differences in parenting norms and support systems between the two countries.
Having a baby in Denmark v the UK: how different is it?
The US tax system heavily relies on labour income, with payroll and individual income taxes accounting for 84% of federal revenue, while corporate taxes contribute less than 9%. As artificial intelligence (AI) reduces dependence on human labour, companies face a tax bias that makes employing workers more expensive than using AI software, due to payroll taxes on wages but none on AI. This shift could weaken funding for social programs like Social Security and Medicare, which depend on employment-based taxes. Addressing this requires tax reform to balance burdens between labour and capital, reducing taxes on employment while increasing taxes on corporate profits and capital income to maintain fiscal sustainability amid AI-driven economic changes.
Financial services, Education
How America’s tax code subsidises artificial intelligence
The September 2026 Chief Economists’ Outlook presents a more stable economic view than earlier in the year, emphasizing geopolitical conflicts and asset-price corrections as major concerns. Fiscal support, a key resilience factor since 2020, is diminishing due to limited governmental capacity. Growth prospects vary regionally: strong in India and Southeast Asia, moderate in the US, weakened in China, and lowest in Europe despite slight improvements. Persistent cost-of-living pressures continue, with real incomes stagnant or declining broadly. Trade and investment evolve amid increasing geoeconomic fragmentation. Artificial intelligence remains a major optimistic factor, though challenges like local opposition to data centers, higher utility costs, and limited job creation persist.
Africa, ASEAN, Latin America
Chief Economists' Outlook: September 2026
The Colorado River faces a 20% flow decline by 2050, creating a state of "water bankruptcy" from a century of overuse exacerbated by climate change and growing demands, including from semiconductor and AI industries. The river supports 40 million people, major agriculture, and critical economic activities, yet reservoirs are at record lows. The U.S. government mandates significant water withdrawal cuts from Arizona, California, and Nevada to address the shortfall. Effective solutions exist, such as urban water efficiency (e.g., Las Vegas's 58% per capita use reduction), industrial water reuse (notably in semiconductor facilities), and nature-based restoration projects to enhance resilience. Scaling these solutions requires capital investment and consensus across stakeholders.
How the American West can restructure its water debt
Sustainability efforts are shifting from ambition to execution amid challenges like geopolitical tensions and short-term business pressures. The World Economic Forum’s Chief Sustainability Officers’ Outlook, surveying 103 CSOs, finds momentum continuing, driven by a stronger business case and accessible sustainable technologies. Key shifts include embracing pathway realism—recognizing uneven, market-specific energy transitions; integrating sustainability into core business planning beyond mere compliance; and broadening focus beyond emissions to include resource management and community support. Companies like ADNOC and Zurich Insurance highlight the importance of resilience, adaptation, and embedding climate risks into decision-making to ensure business continuity and foster sustainable growth.
A promising outlook: the top priorities for chief sustainability officers today
Value-based care, emphasizing health outcomes over service volume, remains underachieved in women's healthcare despite high spending. Women's health outcomes, including maternal mortality, hypertension, and preterm birth rates, have stagnated or worsened. Barriers include healthcare's disease-reactive design, inadequate access, and systemic disparities like maternity deserts and long wait times. Women having children later heightens the need for timely fertility and health support. Addressing these gaps through prevention, early risk identification, and education can improve outcomes and generate substantial economic value, potentially adding $1 trillion annually to the global economy by 2040. Innovative models, such as personalized care advocates and upstream investment, are critical to redesigning care for women's lifelong health journeys.
Health
How to redesign women's healthcare for value
Disclosing foiled terrorist attacks presents a political and economic dilemma for governments. Transparency reassures citizens but can increase fear, leading to economic decline and political shifts. Research on foiled jihadist attacks in 10 European countries (2009-2018) found that announcements reduced foreign tourism significantly, with 2.4% fewer overnight stays and 4.6% fewer international arrivals. Politically, such disclosures boosted support for far-right, anti-immigration parties by about 3%, especially where negative immigration views were already strong. Media coverage intensified these effects, influencing both tourism and voter behavior. Governments must balance the public's right to know against potential economic and political consequences.
Financial services
Disclosing foiled terrorist attacks: a political and economic balancing act
Technology drives modern life, yet society often accepts security breaches, surveillance, predators, and misinformation as inevitable online risks. Francine Berman’s book, Better Tech, argues that technology should be designed to empower and protect users, prioritizing people’s safety and trust. Focusing on essential digital infrastructures like social media, AI chatbots, and search engines, Berman advocates applying risk-mitigation strategies used for physical infrastructure to cyberspace. The book offers a practical guide for responsible design, development, use, and regulation to reduce technology’s harms and promote the public good.
ICT
Better Tech
AI is expected to expand the information marketplace more than in the past 500 years, potentially transforming how individuals understand situations, adapt to change, and make decisions. Achieving this requires an ecosystem that produces reliable knowledge tailored to specific contexts. A report based on discussions among experts from diverse fields identifies 14 value areas and 70 investment opportunities covering information gathering, verification, context integration, decision support, and supporting infrastructure. These aim to harness AI to make knowledge more accessible, relevant, and supportive of complex individual and collective understanding, guiding future practical development of AI-mediated information systems.
ICT, Education
Value in the emerging AI-mediated information ecosystem
The 2026 Global State of Democracy report highlights a "Great Fragmentation" of traditional political alliances amid global uncertainty, with democracies struggling to lead decisively. The Global State of Democracy Indices show stagnation in 81% of cases, with most countries performing at mid- to low levels, indicating fragile political conditions and heightened risks of instability. Between 2020 and 2025, democratic quality declined in 57% of assessed countries, with only 32% showing improvement. Significant declines occurred in freedom of expression (24% of countries), freedom of the press (23%), and access to justice (18%), largely due to coups, conflict, and power centralization, challenging fundamental democratic mechanisms.
Africa, Latin America | Health
The Global State of Democracy 2026
Government collaboration in sovereign data spaces is essential for ensuring data sovereignty in a data-driven era. Initiatives like Gaia-X highlight the growing need for controlled data-sharing environments. Key factors for successful public-sector data spaces include organizational capabilities, innovation, participation, trust, transparency, standardization, and governance. Addressing legal and institutional barriers is critical to enhancing data collaboration. These insights offer practical recommendations for advancing digital government and managing data sovereignty effectively.
ICT, Health
Data Spaces: Public Sector Implementation of Sovereign Data Collaboration
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support democracy, but their application in facilitating deliberation and representing interests may undermine democratic autonomy—the collective's non-instrumental ability to determine its own future. Key conditions for democratic autonomy include shared intentions and the realization of these intentions in policy. Facilitative and representative LLM projects risk violating these conditions, threatening genuine collective self-determination. Practical recommendations are proposed to ensure LLM use enhances rather than diminishes democratic autonomy.
When LLMs Threaten Democratic Autonomy
Meeting the Paris Agreement climate goals requires rapid systemic economic change, but democracies struggle to deliver this transformation. Insulating climate policymaking from democratic control risks fueling authoritarian populism and eroding democracy. Deepening democratic engagement through mechanisms like climate assemblies—deliberative mini-publics—may offer a way out. These assemblies can positively influence participants and somewhat sway public attitudes toward democracy and ambitious climate policies. However, alone they are insufficient to drive the widespread changes needed. Expanding, institutionalizing, and integrating such assemblies within broader democratic reforms is necessary to address the democracy–decarbonization dilemma.
Africa | Health
The Democracy–Decarbonization Dilemma: Can Climate Assemblies Provide an Escape Route?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly autonomous, offering financial innovation benefits while raising concerns about oversight and systemic risk. As AI integrates deeply into financial decision-making, regulators face challenges ensuring system safety and resilience. The Bank of England's deputy governor for financial stability, Sarah Breeden, highlights initial use of AI in low-risk areas like fraud detection but expresses growing concern over agentic AI, which operates with greater independence and complexity. The discussion emphasizes evolving human oversight, regulatory tools to mitigate AI-driven risks, and defining successful regulation in the AI-finance intersection, as part of Wharton's Future of Finance initiative.
Financial services
AI and Financial Regulation
AI has the potential to transform agriculture by improving food system visibility, intelligence, and sustainability, but this requires closing critical data gaps. The challenge is not food production but managing fragmented, incomplete data that hinders decision-making and leads to massive food waste. Successful examples include Cropin's digitization of 400,000 smallholders in Mexico, delivering tailored advisories to farmers in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and accurate weather and yield forecasting for PepsiCo in India, boosting yields and reducing crop loss. For AI to succeed globally, especially among 600 million smallholder farmers, unified data infrastructure and climate-smart technologies are essential to enhance resilience, reduce environmental impact, and support regenerative practices.
AI could transform agriculture – if it gets the data it needs
Strong political leadership is crucial for state success, especially during disruptive times like the rise of AI, which will transform warfare, labor markets, and governance. Leaders face urgent decisions amid uncertainty about AI’s trajectory, including how much to invest in technology, workforce preparation, and security. They must balance political pressures such as the growing "techlash" against AI with long-term stability concerns. Effective navigation requires coordinated efforts across multiple institutions, supported by AI-enabled tools that enhance information synthesis and institutional capacity. Combining political authority with machine intelligence and institutional expertise can improve decision-making and policy implementation in the age of AI.
Education
Leading in the Age of AI: How to Build an AI-Enabled State
AI causing human extinction through autonomous actions like unleashing viruses or hacking critical infrastructure is highly unlikely, as such scenarios require physical access and manual intervention that AI alone cannot perform. Historical cyberattacks on nuclear plants needed physical malware introduction due to air-gapped systems. The real risk lies in societal “enfeeblement,” where overreliance on AI erodes human critical thinking and judgment, as seen in education and medical diagnosis errors influenced by AI suggestions. Current fears of AI-led doomsday often overshadow these more tangible cognitive and ethical challenges.
Could AI really kill all humans? Most scenarios require physical access, making AI armageddon unlikely
Calorie restriction, reducing energy intake by 20-40% while maintaining nutrients, extends lifespan in animals and improves cardiovascular and metabolic health markers in humans, though its effects on human functional healthspan remain unclear. Researchers are investigating calorie-restriction mimetics (CRMs)—compounds in foods like spermidine, resveratrol, catechins, quercetin, and urolithin A—that may mimic these benefits by affecting cellular processes related to aging. Human studies show some healthspan improvements with these supplements, such as enhanced muscle strength and endurance, but evidence is limited and does not conclusively demonstrate extended healthspan or delayed aging.
Can nutrients in our foods mimic calorie restriction and increase our healthspan?

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