Trump, Greta, climate change top trending topics at WEF
DAVOS/ NEW DELHI: US President Donald Trump and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg were the most mentioned people in the news and social media during the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, which ended on Friday.
Despite the meeting beginning with an address by Trump, a climate crisis sceptic, the event’s focus this year to act on the climate emergency made climate change, renewables, sustainability and geopolitics dominate online trends, shows data analysed by WEFLIVE-KPMG, which has been monitoring news and social media surrounding the event for the past nine years.
Trump said his government would support the WEF initiative to grow and conserve one trillion trees around the world to restore biodiversity to mitigate the climate emergency.
The shocker came from Cocacola, one of the world’s biggest producers of plastic waste, after its head of sustainability Bea Perez said in a BBC interview on the sidelines of the WEF that it will not stop using single-use plastic bottles because “consumers want them”.
RACISM ROW AT WEF
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate made a video on social media calling out what she called racism in the media after she was cropped out of an Associated Press agency photo featuring prominent climate activists Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer and Isabelle Axelsson. “Why did you remove me from the photo? I was part of the group,” Nakate tweeted.
“The photographer... cropped it purely on composition grounds,” the news agency’s director of photography, David Ake, said, the BBC reported.