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.
Health and Medicine
Despite the huge achievements of modern sanitation and medicine, humanity faces vast and costly health challenges. New epidemics, environmental illnesses and sensitivities, side effects of drugs and unhealthy lifestyles are affecting the lives of billions. Present health education systems are inadequate for making people sufficiently aware of the variety of health threats. The potential for popular participation of a well-informed public in health care is greatly underrated.
What are the priorities for medical, economic and political reforms to optimise health? How can medical training be improved so that patients are treated as living beings, rather than collections of symptoms? How can different schools of diagnosis and healing be better integrated to help patients choose appropriate methods of healing? How can our right to be protected from potentially toxic new chemicals be ensured in an economically globalised world?