Leaders Research Series: Breaking down the trends behind Davos 2020

For the first time in the history of the WEF Global Risks Survey, environmental concerns dominate the top long-term risks by likelihood among members of the World Economic Forum’s community, including:

• Extreme weather events with major damage to property, infrastructure and loss of human life.
• Failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation by governments and businesses.
• Human-made environmental damage and disasters, including environmental crime, such as oil spills, and radioactive contamination.
• Major biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse (terrestrial or marine) with irreversible consequences for the environment, resulting in severely depleted resources for humankind as well as industries.
• Major natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and geomagnetic storms.

The carbon credit system must undergo a dramatic shift both in the price of carbon and the outdated market infrastructure for trading them to tackle climate change as needed – and in short time. This is particularly pressing given economic vulnerabilities already in place such as high debt, negative interest rates, rising income inequalities and elevated geopolitical risks.

Our latest proprietary research report Carbon Credit Tokenization is an example of our consultation work on digitizing real-world value for the new economy.

Blockchain In Enterprise Part 1 assesses the technological evolution in supply chains, the possible configurations of blockchain for enterprise, the preferred platforms and whether Ethereum still holds the most potential in enterprise, provided it can surmount scaling issues.

Blockchain in Enterprise Part 2 looks at trends in corporate and global governance that are shaping the future of trade and globalization as the Bretton Woods multilateral system reaches its limits. In particular, it looks at the emergent trends of consortium and multi-stakeholder governance, a trend which we posit started with the foundation of the World Economic Forum and from which has evolved Facebook’s Libra Association, a hybrid of consortium and multistakeholder governance.

The Future of the Firm brings together trends in the “gig economy”, innovations in blockchain-based governance and game theory with the constraints on traditional shareholder capitalism to explain what the future of work and the firm ultimately looks. We look at the potential of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) as a new organizational structure that may benefit from the corporate social governance (CSR) trend.

BNC Research is at the apex of insights to the new economy, experts in digital finance, digital currencies and blockchain consulting with over six years in the fintech industry as a purveyor of market data to Nasdaq and Amazon Alexa.