Climate change

Date: 
3 Apr 2009

Climate change is the biggest challenge facing the world. Yet, despite the fact that it will significantly affect every organisation and every region, our collective response is simply not commensurate with the scale of the problem.

We need radical change now if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. Forum for the Future is bringing this about by:

  • defining climate excellence – and aggressively pushing the leading organisations we work with in this direction;
  • using futures work to explore the full suite of risks and opportunities associated with climate change, and to challenge organisations to respond appropriately;
  • fostering, promoting and implementing innovative solutions to climate change (from new technologies, products and services through to new behaviours and organisational processes); and
  • leading the thinking, and stripping away confusion, in areas such as neutrality, labelling and accounting for carbon.

Our work

Climate change – and the need to tackle it – drives and influences much of our work with our partners. We work with them on climate strategy, of course, but we do much more.

We challenge their overall strategic thinking, seeking to ensure that they will not just survive, but thrive, in a world that starts to take climate change seriously – and which starts to feel the impacts of climate change.

We also bring our broad expertise across the full range of sustainability issues to bear on our work on climate, ensuring that our advice on climate change is informed by, and sensitive to, the broader sustainability challenge.

We use the Forum Climate Challenge as a starting point when pushing our partners towards leadership. We have worked with companies as diverse as EDF, Cadbury, Vodafone and John Laing on their carbon management strategies, helping them explore and tackle their full climate impact, and understand the contribution they must make to national, and global, carbon reduction goals. And our West of England Carbon Challenge will challenge and support organisations in the Bristol city region to reduce their collective carbon footprint by 10% in four years, thus helping to make the Bristol city region the most sustainable city region in the UK.

All our futures work is informed by the knowledge that climate change will have a significant impact over the coming decades. Climate Futures, Tourism 2023, Low Carbon Living in 2022 and Farming Futures all explore how society may respond to climate change.

In driving innovative solutions to climate change, we’ve worked with the design teams of companies such as Unilever, Corus and ICI Paints to help develop new lower-carbon products. The FT Climate Change Challenge seeks to highlight the vital role of innovation in tackling climate change, showcase the most exciting new approaches, products and services to tackle climate change, and help get them to market. And with i:team we’ve developed a new way of engaging partners to develop – and build internal ownership of – novel solutions to climate change.

Our thought-leadership on climate change has focused on our key sectors and on adding clarity to controversial topics such as carbon neutrality or carbon labelling.

For a full list of our resources on climate change, click here.

Contact: Iain Watt

Comments

Forum for the Future welcomes constructive comment and differing opinions. We reserve the right not to publish messages which we believe are commercial or designed to disrupt discussion. We moderate comments according to these guidelines.

China's Serious Environment Problem

The economic progress made in China comes at the expense of the pollution of environment. The industry economy grows quickly; but pollution becomes more serious. Unfortunately, the great majority of people here are insensitive to the pollution.

China is imitating the West's high pattern of consumerism. Chinese people hope to own private cars, motorcycles, and big houses consuming large power sources as western nations. The Chinese government is making efforts to realize this aim. China is producing a large amount of cars and motorcycles, cement and brick, exploiting many coal mines, ore mines and oil fields, and building large multi-story buildings and highways, enlarging blindly more and more land areas of cities and towns. Large areas of land are damaged by the exploitation of natural resources. Cars and motorcycles are increasing greatly.

The population in China is multitudinous "1500000000", which is five times of the population of the US. China is short of cultivated land. In spite of this case, the Chinese government is developing the private car industry greatly. The construction of new highways will take up large areas of land. Traffic accidents have increased greatly. In 2003 200,000 people died in traffic accidents in China. Building development is in confusion. Building technique is primitive and large amounts of materials are consumed. China poured 50% of the world's cement and steel - building a house consumes more cement steel and brick in China than the western nations. But these houses make little use of insulation letting heat flow out in the winter and letting the heat in during the hot summer months. House repairs are more difficult, too. Chinese concern beauty of own house very much, but are not concerned about the environment round the house. They spend large amounts of money on their own house, but they are stingy in spending money on the environment around their house.

Garbage removal is primitive. Chinese don't know the classification of garbage. Waste plastic bags are visible everywhere. The Chinese people like to use plastic bags and batteries just once and then throw them away. Governments pay great attention to beauty of city, spending much money on the appearance of city. But they pay little attention to garbage classification. Large amounts of garbage are made by high consumption. Rivers are polluted by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, chemical synthetic detergents (washing powders), industry waste water, human excrement and urine. Waste water, excrement and urine flow directly into rivers without any treatment. Most rivers in china are unsuitable for drinking. Many Chinese people are harmed by drinking water from polluted rivers. Education about protecting the environment is blank. People lack an understanding and concept of protecting the environment. Chinese people are poor, but they are not frugal. Chinese are concerned about the beauty of houses but don't concern about the beauty of the environment. Chinese are concerned about their own health but don't care about environmental health. They like to inject and swallow more medicines and eat more wild animals, but they don't realize that the polluted food, water and air are threatening their health greatly.

The population in China is multitudinous, 1.5 billion people, over five times the population of the US. China is short of cultivated land. The actual situation demands that China doesn't imitate the west's high consumption. China should develop electronic information consumption and develop economizing energy industries. If not, the Chinese would ruin their own environment and furthermore, affect the global environment. The Chinese don't realize that pollution is their most dangerous enemy.