World Economic Forum 2025
The 55th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, centered around the theme "Collaboration for the Intelligent Age", provided a vital space for delving into the fundamental principles of rebuilding trust, reimagining growth, and safeguarding the planet.
This year’s Annual Meeting welcomed over 2,500 leaders from diverse sectors, including government, business, civil society, and esteemed scientific, academic, and cultural thinkers. Holcim was proud to host several impactful events focused on advancing decarbonization and circularity in the built environment.
Discussions highlighted the significance of innovation and collaboration in making cities more circular and resilient, and reinforced the need for sustainable practices within construction to shape a better future for both people and the planet.
- Date: 20-24 January, 2025
- Location: Davos, Switzerland
The World Economic Forum is the ideal opportunity to engage with public authorities to evolve building norms and regulations that will accelerate the transition to more circular and sustainable building. It’s also the place to partner with like-minded companies to scale up innovations that will help us reinvent how the world builds.
By building cities from cities, we can realize the vision of making circular and sustainable construction possible at scale, which is a true game-changer for net-zero building. To speed up this transition, we need deep collaboration across the entire value chain and the World Economic Forum is the place to do this.
Goals House - "Circular Disruption: A New Era For Construction"
The transition to circular construction demands reimagining of how we design, build and procure. Designers and developers are rethinking buildings from the ground up, creating structures that prioritize adaptability, longevity and material reuse. Industries and entrepreneurs are pioneering new ways to manufacture, use and recycle materials, transforming the construction sector into a driver of sustainability, while public procurers are setting new standards that lead the way toward significant system change.
Together with Goals House, Holcim explored the important role of innovation in sustainable material manufacturing,cross-sectoral collaboration and forward-thinking procurement policies.
- Host: Holcim
- Date: 20 January, 2025
We also spoke with industry thought leaders and experts to explore the importance of partnerships in advancing sustainable building:
“The future of construction is circular. So far Holcim has taken a local approach - finding the right partners and unlocking opportunities to advance circular construction. Now we are scaling this approach.”
“As startups we bring agility, speed and urgency to tackle the challenges the construction industry faces today. Getting a strategic partner like Holcim early on is key to rolling out circular technologies like ours - because we optimize it together, and scale it across markets.”
“If you set sustainability as an objective for the design process, there won’t be a green premium. In fact, there will soon be a green discount as carbon pricing on building materials evolves in the EU.”
SDG TENT - "THE NEW NATURE OF BUILDINGS AND CITIES"
Today’s built environment delivers the essentials for human life on an astonishing scale. Cities provide unique ecosystems that can be adapted to accelerate the integration of living architecture, particularly in dense urban areas. With evolving infrastructure needs, the broad “built environment” sector has an opportunity to embark on a gradual transformation whereby our cities, neighborhoods and built places become the engines of a thriving future where humans and nature co-evolve and prosper.
Holcim led a dinner-debate exploring how cities, neighborhoods, and built environments can become the engines of nature-positive transformation through innovative practices in the built environment sector.
- Host: Holcim
- Date: 21 January, 2025
“Cities are growing rapidly and need to adapt for the future, so we need to build them differently - more sustainably, more resiliently, more durably. To make this happen, we have to align the whole building ecosystem. That’s why in our industry partnership is the new leadership.”
“We care a lot about nature and biodiversity. The more we can bring nature into cities, the more we as humans can enjoy its many benefits. Our deep dive with IUCN into eight leading cities shows how we can unlock actionable solutions, so that other cities can take that playbook and multiply it at scale.”
“As Holcim, we have a key role when it comes to bringing solutions for nature and we also need governments, to create enabling conditions to help us accelerate this nature-positive transition. Our report with IUCN shows how some cities are already doing this, and how the right regulations and incentives can make this happen faster.”
“We will not reach our climate targets without nature. Every single sector has a role to play in the transition to a nature-positive economy – and that’s an opportunity! Holcim has done a fantastic job to show that."
“With urbanization in mind, our sector has the potential to reverse nature loss. With Holcim we’re working on an amazing urban mining project to ensure we urbanize while respecting planetary boundaries.”
“As more people move to cities, we need different solutions and different spaces for cities to preserve nature and biodiversity. And we need to think about how nature in cities improves people’s wellbeing. Our partnership with Holcim is a win-win with regards to making the nature-positive transition a reality.”
House of Switzerland - "Reimagining The Future of Construction"
The future of sustainable and circular cities lies in rethinking the materials that build them. Entrepreneurs are pioneering new ways to manufacture, use and recycle materials, transforming construction and associated industries into drivers of sustainability. With advanced technologies breaking down barriers, industries long seen as challenging to decarbonize now find themselves leading the charge toward important systemic change.
This high-level panel with representatives from across the entrepreneurial, investment, business, regulatory and policy making spheres highlighted the significance of disruptive innovations in developing sustainable construction practices in urban hubs.
- Host: Holcim and Solar Impulse Foundation
- Date: 22 January, 2025
Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime Systems
“Holcim is the leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions in part because we are lucky to be based in Switzerland. It is the lighthouse of our innovation, where we are formulating next generation building products that are sustainable and circular to meet our customers' most ambitious needs and targets.”
Cédric de Meeûs, Vice-President, Group Public Affairs & Social Impact at Holcim
Bertrand Piccard, Founder of Solar Impulse Foundation, together with Miljan Gutovic, CEO of Holcim
our NEWSLETTER: Building progress
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