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.
Socially and Environmentally Responsible Production and Technologies
The industrialisation of the world based on the current model is ecologically impossible. Already the industrial countries face very substantial legacies of toxic residues in their soil and water that are extremely costly to remove. Poor countries will follow the current path until a better one is in sight. The parameters of clean industrialization need to be much better defined. New incentives are needed to spread eco-industrial design, based on bio-degradable product lifecycles. The technologies used need to be skill-enhancing instead of skill-destroying.
How can we assure the widespread adoption of circular and waste-eliminating "cradle-to-cradle" production systems? What are the parametres of such systems and how do we reach international agreements on these? Can the leasing principle be made mandatory to encourage product redesign from the bottom up? What tests should be required before new products are permitted? How can the introduction of non-toxic alternatives be promoted and accelerated? How can technologies be made socially responsible and responsive?