Posted in Blog, Club of Rome News on Oct 30, 2026.
Author: Raad Sharar, Programme Lead at the Club of Rome
Impact Week 2026 carried a bold theme, “Love as Infrastructure,” and one session sharpened it into a more explorative question: Love is not a leadership competency, or is it? Carlos Álvarez Pereira, Secretary General of the Club of Rome, opened with an engineer’s candour. Infrastructure evokes bridges, highways and digital networks, all products of rational design, and love belongs to the world of feeling, something people sense and carry within them. The session focused on uniting these two elements and drawing the discussion toward their meeting point.
The Club of Rome’s Fifth Element programme offered a fitting lens. Its discussion paper, Dancing with Paradigms, sets out an ambitious aim: reconciliation among humans, with all living beings and with time. It pursues that aim through a handful of guiding commitments. It bets on “the humanity and capacity of everybody” to learn and change. It embraces pluriversality, honouring the many context-rooted pathways toward wellbeing on a healthy planet. It works across chasms of generation, geography, discipline and worldview. And it weaves ancient wisdom together with modern science to close what the Club of Rome calls the “human gap,” the distance between our power to transform the world and our capacity to understand the consequences. Read through that lens, the session was asking whether love might be the leadership capacity that makes all of this possible.
All of us are equipped for love, if we reconnect with our own humanity.
– Carlos Álvarez Pereira, Secretary General of the Club of Rome
