Past Insights

We know that water, forests, soils – all the essentials of life – are becoming depleted and degraded at a dangerous rate. We know that our climate is changing at a speed and on a scale far beyond anything modern humanity has experienced. And we know that the hard scientific evidence of environmental collapse is becoming starker by the day.

The likely consequences – in terms of economic and social disruption – are becoming all too clear. This is the crisis we now face.

At the forefront of dealing with these challenges is the Forum for the Future, a UK-based group that believes our dire situation is emphatically not a call to despair, but instead an opportunity for good – a chance to effect the lasting positive change only possible when confronted by such a challenge.

Since 1996, the Forum for the Future has focused on transforming businesses based in Europe into more sustainable enterprises. Now, the organization is expanding its focus to the US. The Forum’s goal is to create a world that is environmentally sustainable, socially just and economically prosperous. I’m proud to announce I joined the Forum’s Board of Advisors last month.

Jonathon Porritt, who is also the former Director of Friends of the Earth UK and a Co-Director of the Prince of Wales’s Business & Sustainability Programme, founded the Forum. Porritt was also Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission between 2000 and 2009. He is the author of Capitalism: As if the World Matters, on my list of the “10 Best Books Ever Written” and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the essentials of developing a sustainable economy.

Over the past 15 years, Forum for the Future has:

• Helped Marks & Spencer develop ‘Plan A’, which had a profound impact on wider business behavior (Plan A set out 100 commitments to achieve in 5 years. Marks & Spencer has since extended Plan A to 180 commitments to achieve by 2015, with the ultimate goal of becoming the world’s most sustainable major retailer.)
• Worked with Unilever on its Sustainable Living Plan, with its ambitious target to help more than one billion people improve their health and well-being, halve the environmental impact of our products, and source 100% of Unilever’s agricultural raw materials sustainably).
• Developed the Sustainable Shipping Initiative that united leaders from across the global maritime sector, including Maersk, Rio Tinto and Cargill, and embraces ship owners, charterers, shipbuilders, engineers, service providers and financiers to better understand the reasons why the sector needs to become sustainable.
• Helped AkzoNobel develop Ecosure and Ecosense, award-winning paints, with low environmental footprints.
• Founded the London Sustainability Exchange with the City of London Corporation back in 2000 and launched it as an independent NGO in 2008 with a portfolio of groundbreaking climate change awareness work with the capital’s black and minority ethnic communities.
• Launched an ambitious 10-year program aiming to make Bristol one of the world’s greenest cities, and the region a beacon of UK sustainability.
• Worked with Telefónica O2 UK to develop the UK’s first sustainability rating scheme for cell phones. The Eco rating responded to customers’ demands for more information, showing them a sophisticated but simple assessment, which takes the full range of mobile phone sustainability impacts into account. The scheme also aims to encourage healthy competition between handset manufacturers to drive up standards, and to help the industry understand the role it can play in creating a sustainable future.

In the United States, the Forum would like to focus on three key areas:

1. Make business sustainable by providing strategic advice to businesses to build sustainability into their core strategy and operations and help them create cutting edge business models.

2. Define a positive future by creating inspirational – but credible – stories of the future. These help people understand the full range of risks and opportunities that they face in the coming decades. They take people out of the day-to-day and paint pictures of what the world might be like, stimulating all sorts of new product and service ideas. And they raise the level of ambition, creating a mandate for change.

3. Accelerate innovation – and bringing it to scale. We need to harness the power of ‘systems innovation’, challenging existing patterns so as to achieve breakthroughs on a life-changing scale – as happened with the internet or mobile phones. Innovation brings out the best in us: it demands the sort of energy, creativity and willingness to take risks that have characterized the most ambitious human endeavors down the centuries.

The future looks bright with this Forum committing itself to positive change amidst a negatively impacted environment.