Key Global Challenges as Defined by The World Future Council

“You can’t get a question right or an answer right if you are not thinking interdisciplinarily.” (Ron Mitchell)

Key Global Challenges

The challenges we face are considerable: from rethinking our relationship with the environment, and the wide-reaching implications this has, to tackling the persistent inequalities and injustices that characterise our relationships with each other. The World Future Council (WFC) has identified 24 key issues that it will seek to address. With each campaign the WFC will highlight the connections between these areas, and aim to integrate them into its policy recommendations.

The global challenges can be roughly grouped into three categories:

Environment | Social Issues | Economics and Politics

We present these challenges with a series of questions that are typically brought up in the discourse. Starting from these fundamental considerations we develop our own position that will be presented in our position papers and campaign materials.

Environment

The key global challenges grouped together in this category concern our relationship with the planet that supports us. With limited natural resources, an increasingly urbanised and ever-growing population, and the looming threat of irreversible climate change, the need to reconsider the way we interact with our environment has never been more pressing. Paramount to this is the acknowledgement that we are a part of the global ecosystem and not its rulers.

• Healthy Food for All
• Clean Water for All
• Safe Energy and Transport
• Tackling Climate Change
• Sustainable and Liveable Cities
• Intelligent and Sensitive Building
• Sustainable Use of Forests
• Sustainable Use of the Oceans

Social Issues

The key global challenges grouped together in this category are concerned with ensuring that people across the world can lead healthy and fulfilled lives. This involves embracing the diversity of human traits and capabilities, and acknowledging that we are all equal and yet distinct.

• Human Rights and Responsibilities
• Revitalising Democracy
• Peace Education and Conflict Healing
• Health and Medicine
• Education and the Media
• Indigenous People and Bio-cultural Diversity
• Childrens’ Rights
• Science and Spirituality

Economics and Politics

The key global challenges grouped together in this category are concerned with the organisation of human societies and the relationships between them. This involves fair and peaceful exchange, and an equitable distribution of costs and benefits in the creation of global welfare.

• Good Work for All
• Responsible Entrepreneurship
• Monetary and Tax Reforms
• Fair Trade
• Reform of International Institutions
• Nuclear Disarmament
• Biological, Chemical and Conventional Disarmament
• Socially and Environmentally Responsible Production and Technologies

A Sampling of Definitions and Questions

Clean Water for All – Environment

Global water availability is limited. Water is being wasted by the rich, becoming unaffordable for the poor and polluted by both. Privatisation is being promoted as the best way of making adequate supplies of safe water available in poor countries. Despite growing concerns about their environmental and social impacts, large dams are still being constructed to ‘assure’ water supplies in places where efficient water systems could be employed with minimal impacts. Investment in water could save an estimated 125 billion dollars a year in medical expenses and costs associated with lower productivity related to preventable water-related diseases.

What are the political, educational and technical changes needed to ensure sufficient clean water for all? How can a global clean water program be implemented? How can areas of extreme water shortages best be dealt with? How can urban wastewater be used in food production? Which technical solutions work best and in which circumstances? How can sustainable water supplies for future generations be safeguarded?

Climate Change – Environment

There is now little doubt that climate change has become a reality. Glaciers are melting all over the world. Weather patterns are becoming more erratic. The IPPC forecasts increases of global mean temperatures of up to 5.8 degrees this century and sea level rises of up to one meter. Half the world’s people live within 50 km of seashores and their lives will be severely affected by flooding. Up to a million species of plants and animals could be lost due to climate change.

Are viable transitional scenarios available to deal with climate change? Can the widely acclaimed Contraction and Convergence1 scenario be implemented through international agreement? Can emissions trading be made to work and what are its limits? Could biological and technical carbon sequestration be part of a transitional strategy over the coming decades? Is adaptation to rather than prevention of climate change a realistic scenario?

Revitalising Democracy – Social Issues

Our democratic systems of governance are facing a growing crisis of confidence. Fewer people vote and a smaller part of each voter votes: we are addressed only as consumers and thus vote only our consumer preferences. Our deeper citizen priorities and values are ignored in sound-bite election campaigns that offer few alternatives. As a result governments and political parties are trusted less and less and voters are becoming disillusioned. This development holds the risk that in a crisis situation, ’strong men’ offering scapegoats could have mass appeal.

How can we rehabilitate democracy – from the local to the global level? Should local direct democracy be reintroduced, with the right to vote directly, e.g. on spending priorities, as the PT has done in Brazil? How can we democratise global decision-making? Would an electronic Earth Parliament (”E-Parliament”), where all democratically elected MPs have the right to introduce and vote for model legislation, be workable and effective?

Education and the Media – Social Issues

Our educational system is struggling to maintain its relevance in a fast-changing world. Learning never stops and people need to continuously enhance their knowledge. Global communications has taken on a quasi-educational role, yet mass entertainment should not be confused with the spread of knowledge. A global consumerist monoculture can only be countered by safeguarding the individual right to choose life-styles within sustainable limits. We need to find new ways of safeguarding the values of a free media whilst enforcing their responsibilities.

How can our educational systems be adapted and enabled to provide appropriate tuition for all at all ages? How can ‘commerce-free education’ be safeguarded? What is the role of the state in supporting and promoting education and culture? In an ever-faster age, how can we protect the slow? What best practices exist to overcome the digital divide? How can computer literacy be spread without further supporting the global monopoly of a few corporations?

Good Work for All – Economics and Politics

Much work being done by people today is destructive to the planet, carries unnecessary risks to workers, is boring and does not pay a living wage. Local economies everywhere are threatened by economic globalisation, and yet jobs for local markets can often be created at a fraction of the cost of jobs for global markets. In the ‘developed countries’, many skilled workers are unemployed whilst ‘developing countries’ often suffer from severe skills shortages.

What can we do to assure a better global division of labour? How can working conditions and job opportunities be created that benefit both people and planet? What reforms are required to create a better and more sustainable work situation, actively involving workers and benefiting consumers? How should work be remunerated to maximize the creation of true wealth?

Socially and Environmentally Responsible Production and Technologies – Economics and Politics

The industrialisation of the world based on the current model is ecologically impossible. Already the industrial countries face very substantial legacies of toxic residues in their soil and water that are extremely costly to remove. Poor countries will follow the current path until a better one is in sight. The parameters of clean industrialization need to be much better defined. New incentives are needed to spread eco-industrial design, based on bio-degradable product lifecycles. The technologies used need to be skill-enhancing instead of skill-destroying.

How can we assure the widespread adoption of circular and waste-eliminating “cradle-to-cradle” production systems? What are the parametres of such systems and how do we reach international agreements on these? Can the leasing principle be made mandatory to encourage product redesign from the bottom up? What tests should be required before new products are permitted? How can the introduction of non-toxic alternatives be promoted and accelerated? How can technologies be made socially responsible and responsive?

To view the rest of the key challenges, visit the website of The World Future Council.

Also read their initial report on concrete solutions which have succeeded in generating meaningful, positive change in relation to the key global challenges listed above in “Policies to Change the World.” (PDF)

List of successfull initiatives in the report are: The Montreal Protocol, Danish Wind Cooperatives, German Renewable Energy Law, Solar Thermal Ordinance in Barcelona, Congestion Charging, Urban Transport Solutions – Bogota’s Transmilenio, Urban Agriculture, Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, Eco-labelling, Circular Economy, Plastic Bag Levy, and Mine Ban Treaty.