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 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:
Global Challenges
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.
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.
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.
Clean Water for All
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?