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.
Revitalising Democracy
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 "Partido dos Trabalhadores" (Workers` Party) 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?