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.
Science and Spirituality
Modern science has brought us a huge benefits, but at what price? Modernity rejects the super-material ('super-natural') as an impediment in the race to material prosperity. The prevailing materialistic ideology sees us only as competing genetic machines in a meaningless universe. Reductionism and social Darwinism rule our social sciences, medicine, etc. Yet they risk becoming another intolerant faith. For as the study of life on ever more microscopic levels becomes possible, the evidence for its irreducible complexity and intelligence continues to grow.
Can a new dialogue between science and spirituality overcome the increasing public distrust faced by the current scientific paradigm? Could this help to create common approach to the many challenges we face? Which scientific projects should be halted until a wider consensus on the implications can be reached? Do we need a new social contract between science and society?