Global Challenges
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:
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.

Human Rights and Responsibilities

Rights remain empty unless there is a responsibility to secure them. Proclaiming unenforceable rights may have a moral relevance but can breed cynicism. The Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charters and Conventions have built a body of international soft law, complemented by the hard law of The Hague Court judgments and agreements containing sanctions. But implementation remains patchy and unbalanced.

The Declaration of Human Duties and Responsibilities, prepared for UNESCO in 1998 but never brought to a vote, provides a starting point for a world order where human rights are secured by corresponding moral duties and legal responsibilities of various actors and levels of society. How can it be implemented? How can human rights best be enforced? Is the concept of interconnected human rights and responsibilities useful?