1. It’s a good time to catch up with friends. Most of the attendees have full schedules. They’re at the top of their game, whether in the corporate, non-profit, or government worlds. Most of their close friends tend to share the same high-intensity, obsessive personality traits, partly because like attracts like and partly because these traits are prerequisites to climbing up the power ladder and thus moving in the same social circles. So, trying to coordinate schedules to spend personal time with friends is difficult, if not impossible. Davos is the coordinating point.

1. Angela Merkel, Federal Chancellor of Germany
2. Giuseppe Conte, Prime Minister of Italy
3. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission
4. David Sassoli, President of the European Parliament
5. Boyko Borisov, Prime Minister of Bulgaria
6. Andrej Plenkovic, Prime Minister of Croatia
7. Gitanas Nauseda, President of Lithuania
8. Pedro Sanchez, Prime Minister of Spain

Source: Financial Times

Intellectual property

The EU plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 % by 2030 and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. This will require a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. In particular, it will mean phasing out coal, with impacts on jobs and regional economies. In order to support this energy transition, the von der Leyen Commission has proposed a Just Transition Mechanism as part of the European Green Deal.

In October 2020, the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity will meet in China to review the achievement and delivery of the strategic plan. At the conference (COP15), they are expected to adopt a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, with conservation goals for the next decade. The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has expressed the ambition that the EU 'lead the world' at this COP, as it did at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference.

Citizens expect administrations to take their contributions into account and, if not, to explain why. When the feedback is inadequate or nonexistent, the trust relationship between the citizens and the administration can be damaged. Progress has been made in 'user-centricity' (i.e. availability, usability and mobile friendliness). Yet online participatory procedures are still, for the most part, time-consuming and rather disappointing for citizens.

Source: Politico

Climate mainstreaming in the EU budget is expected to become one strand of a broader strategy. In the speech presenting her College of Commissioners and their programme to the European Parliament, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted the European Green Deal as the EU's new growth strategy, which is meant to cut emissions while creating new jobs.

In 2020, we will hear more and more about 5G – the next generation of broadband infrastructure with gigabit speeds – as according to the Commission's targets, this is the year when it is supposed to become commercially available in at least one big city in each EU Member State. Already in 2019, some countries started launching and experimenting with 5G pilots, but wider deployment is expected once the 5G standards and the dedicated 5G spectrum pioneer bands become available by the end of 2020.

The EU hopes that its free trade agreement (FTA) and investment protection agreement (IPA) with Vietnam will boost trade and investment; the agreements are also an important stepping stone to the EU’s longer-term goal of a region-to-region EU-Southeast Asia trade deal. Vietnam, a fast-growing and competitive economy whose bilateral trade with the EU has quintupled over the past ten years, is equally keen on the deal, which could potentially bring €15 billion a year of additional exports to the EU by 2035.