Britain’s ‘creative industries’ generate £67bn of revenue and are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy. But as well as their economic muscle, these industries have a vital role to play in delivering a sustainable future.

Formally defined as the performing arts, arts & antiques, crafts, architecture, design, fashion, advertising, radio & TV, film & video, music, publishing, video games and software, the UK’s creative industries’ innovation and energy will be key in addressing the great challenges of our time – resource scarcity, climate change, waste, pollution, a growing population and poverty.

We’ve teamed up with the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network to help leading players across these diverse sectors come together to share their knowledge and build a vision for how these problems will be tackled. The project kicks off on 16th June with an event chaired by Jonathon Porritt. Contributions from Lord Puttnam and Sebastian Conran will accompany a panel debate in an innovative, interactive talk-show format with a panel that includes 10:10 and ‘Age of Stupid’s’ Franny Armstrong, IDEO CEO Tim Brown, London College of Fashion’s Frances Corner OBE, Naked Communication's Victoria Brooks and Exploration Architecture’s Michael Pawlyn.

This is no stab in the dark – throughout history creative interventions have driven important social change. The Bauhaus movement championed a design philosophy of fairness and utility, to provide universal access to good design, better housing, and better lives for all. Graphic and film propaganda helped galvanise our nation to successful action during WWII and social marketing over the last 20 years has helped educate, raise awareness and communicate better thinking and acting on issues as wide as anti-social behaviour on trains, healthy lifestyles and anti-smoking.

And already, new forms of social media – enabled by software and IT platforms like twitter, kiva or netsquared – are helping to bridge social divides, connect people without travel and encourage good deeds. Green architecture is now mainstream and many of our flagship examples of building excellence heavily feature sustainability considerations – think the Gherkin, EDEN project, Olympics Village, etc.

But this is not yet universal across all of the creative industries and some disciplines are certainly more engaged and active on sustainability than others. There is also a larger question of whether industries are really leading, rather than following or responding to sustainability.

We think that building a genuinely sustainable future – that is green, fair and prosperous – will need us to inspire and motivate people, businesses, communities and societies to quite radical changes. This is an opportunity, even an imperative, the scale of which we probably haven’t faced before. It offers a fantastic new set of innovation levers to rethink and reinvent the world which is exactly what ‘creatives’ do really well. That’s precisely why creative industry involvement will be key to making this happen. It falls to this generation of creatives, scientists, designers and innovators to imagine a world they want to live in and then build it to last.

We’ll be running a series of events and creating an online dialogue over the next few months – in an open process designed to exchange and capture the best thinking. So, if you’re from either a creative industry or are a sustainability professional, we want to hear from you.

To share your thoughts on the creative industries and sustainability or to find out how to get involved, email Louise Armstrong or message us on Twitter @forum4thefuture.

Five days ago I was lucky enough to be strolling along a country lane on a clear blue morning, when a hare rushed out of a wheatfield, virtually under my feet. It tore across the lane into a pasture, and startled a skylark. The bird rose in a flurry of flapping, circled a little and then hung in the air, sending out those wonderful high trills of song, the archetypal soundtrack of spring-into-summer.

So far, so bucolic. Around me, the countryside rolled gently away; wheat and woods and scattered farmhouses. It could have been a typical English idyll, Suffolk perhaps, or Kent, but for two striking differences. Most of the farm roofs were covered in wide arrays of solar panels, shiny in the low sunlight. And behind the lark, slowly, majestically, the blades of a huge wind turbine were lazily turning. It wasn’t alone. This stretch of Westphalian countryside, in the north-west of Germany, is garnished with hundreds of turbines, quietly pumping out power into the grid.

And quiet is, literally, the operative word.  Not silent: standing almost directly beneath the turbine, I couldn’t avoid hearing the rythmic swoosh of the blades as they circled. But I could also clearly hear the lark, and the plaintive cry of a buzzard arcing over the wood across the field. And by the time I’d reached the end of the lane, a few hundred metres further on, I had to strain to make out the turbine at all.

Of course, wind strength and direction, and the amount of moisture in the air, all make a difference; it’s not always quite so quiet. But it’s a million miles from the nightmare vision conjured up by the anti-wind campaigners in Britain, with their wild warnings of a ruined idyll turned into an industrial noisescape.

I found myself longing to parachute a few of them over the North Sea and into this gorgeous blue morning, to let them hear the turbines for themselves, in glorious situ. And the buzzards, and the larks. 

Image credit: Pedro Miguel-Nunes

Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”
So how can an industry become sustainable when the ‘we loved it, but now we shun it’ cycle is embedded so deeply? Do we have to change everything we love about fashion to make it a sustainable, fair industry? Not necessarily.

Last night, amid the glamour and excitement of London Fashion Week, we held a drinks party with Levi Strauss & Co., to launch our joint report Fashion Futures which explores the world of 2025 and the role of the fashion industry within it. More than a hundred fashion industry folk turned up to hear about our four vivid scenarios and view the animations, which bring them to life.

Follow this link to find out what kind of worlds might see cities inundated by second-hand department stores; high-street brands competing on sustainability credentials; people partying in biodegradable, spray-on outfits; and regions where grow-your-own clothing is popular.

We created the scenarios to help companies around the globe navigate the ever-changing challenge of developing sustainable businesses. They compel us to mull over big questions we wouldn’t usually consider when thinking short-term. Like how the industry will react to shortages of cotton and other raw materials – or how people will care for their clothes in a future of water shortages and high energy prices – which raises deeper questions like whether current business models will survive in a retail market that’s very different from today.

We have deliberately avoided making Fashion Futures a read-it-then-shelve-it report. We want companies of all shapes and sizes, from all corners of the globe, to use the four scenarios. We want them to be inspired, perhaps even a little scared by some of them, but hopefully motivated to think differently about the future and excited by the idea that a sustainable fashion industry is achievable.

To this end, we’ve published some workshop materials on our website with advice on how to use the scenarios to shape strategy, push for sustainable design and innovation and generate the skills needed for a sustainable industry.

And we’ve brought the scenarios to life with four powerful two-minute animations, which show just how different they are, and how much a sustainable future depends on us taking bold action today.

Fashion Futures has already been put to practical use. Our project partner, Levi Strauss & Co. is using the scenarios internally, to inform strategy and innovation. As Michael Kobori (pictured), LS&Co’s Vice President of Social and Environmental Sustainability said at the launch party yesterday, "These scenarios are so stimulating, we will be sharing them with senior management to inform our broad strategies, with designers to spur them to create more sustainable products, and with all employees to unleash the power of our entire company to think about sustainability."

And we’ve used them to help fashion students understand how to design for the future, working with the great team at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion. Four groups of students from the 2009-10 MA Fashion and the Environment – a diverse and enthusiastic bunch from all over the world - spent their autumn term living and breathing one of the Fashion Futures scenarios, creating new ideas and businesses that would thrive in such a world. They not only produced some great, thought-provoking concepts, which are illustrated in our report, but they also helped us shape the scenarios at one of the critical stages of development.

So this is the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re looking forward to helping our partners and others use the scenarios and we’re excited to hear how other organisations will use them in innovative ways.