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.
Childrens' Rights
Previous generations have often made large sacrifices to provide a better life for their children. Today many of us are doing the opposite: we are sacrificing the interests of our children and their children for our own short-term comfort, believing that they will somehow find solutions to the problems we have created. In the light of this, existing children's rights agreements urgently need to be implemented, and new ones defined to insure the rights of future generations.
What sanctions for non-compliance are appropriate? How can the voice of youth be taken into account in decision-making? How can violence against children be effectively countered? Which programs dealing with child labour and exploitation, and with supporting street children have been effective? How can the right to education receive the necessary resources? What are the best ways of restricting advertising to children? How can they best be protected from violence in the media and the Internet?