Karan, Gayathri to represent India at WEF Davos

The Global Shapers Community – an initiative of the World Economic Forum announces two young Shapers from India will attend its 2023 Annual Meeting in Davos

Karan Kumar (27) and Gayathri Kuppendra Reddy (31) have been selected among 500+ applicants to actively explore the role of private-public collaboration to solve the global climate crisis.

Hyderabad: Two young Indians Gayathri Reddy and Karan Kumar will attend the upcoming WEF Annual Meeting in January 2023, leveraging their collective experience of more than 15 years to bring climate issues to the fore, and enable positive outcomes through their engagements. They represent the Bengaluru and Mumbai hubs of the Global Shaper Community (GSC) respectively, two of the 500 hubs worldwide carrying out grassroots projects to tackle some of the most pressing problems in their communities and the world.

 

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Annual Meeting brings together more than 2500 world leaders from business, policy, and civil society along with select young people part of The Global Shapers Community (GSC), one of the Forum’s key initiatives focused on engaging young people across the world in driving dialogue, action and change.

Karan is the outgoing curator of the Mumbai hub and a Programme Manager with Laudes India. He is focused on driving circularity and sustainability in the global fashion industry by working to both inspire and challenge the industry as a means to achieving large-scale system transformation; bringing innovations to scale through collaboration, investment, knowledge- and market-building. His work has led to early successes in scaling critical low-carbon, circular technologies across different geographies and sectors. Gayathri is the present Vice-Curator of the Bengaluru hub and is an entrepreneur and investor. She is the Director of RGA Software Systems Pvt. Ltd., a leading developer of Grade A commercial office spaces in Bengaluru, India. She is also the Founder of KReate Foundation - a not-for-profit that works towards a better Bengaluru by addressing problems focused on the need for systemic urban planning and infrastructure development.

 

As young climate leaders, both Karan and Gayathri are keen to engage with governments and businesses at the meeting and spotlight emerging opportunities for change that we can all work collaboratively on. These include ways to move away from linear extractive supply chains by working collaboratively with industry, innovators, and producers; and working towards ensuring inclusive, long-term policy development through stakeholder mapping, education, awareness building and more.

Their three-point agenda at the WEF is to:

●    Increase awareness on climate change, the need for finance to move towards climate solutions and the larger system-level consequences without such efforts

●    Promote sustainable and low-carbon urban design for cities and infrastructure to decarbonise key industrial supply chains

●    Collaborate across industries and governments to scale a circular, regenerative, and renewable economy