Activities
- Future Policy Award
The Future Policy Award celebrates policies that create better living conditions for current and future generations. The aim of the award is to raise global awareness for these exemplary policies and speed up policy action towards just, sustainable and peaceful societies. The Future Policy Award is the first award that celebrates policies rather than people on an international level. Each year the World Future Council chooses one topic on which policy progress is particularly urgent. In 2009, the Future Policy Award highlighted exemplary policies for food security. In the International Year on Biodiversity, the Future Policy Award 2010 celebrated the world's best biodiversity policies. In the International Year of Forests, the Future Policy Award 2011 celebrated successful policies that protect, enhance and sustainably utilize forests for people, and thus contribute to a better world. In 2012, the Future Policy Award will celebrate the world’s most inspiring, innovative and influential lpolicies on the protection of oceans and coasts.
- Expert Commission on Cities and Climate Change
Together, the WFC and Hamburg HafenCity University, founded the international Expert Commission on Cities and Climate Change in 2008. The commission comprises 20 experts in the field of sustainable city development including architects, city planners and representatives of UN Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Holding direct advisory mandates for UN Habitat’s World Urban Campaign, the WFC provided the Campaign’s network with a catalogue of criteria for future just policies.
- Implementation of Feed-in Tariff Laws
Feed-In Tariff (FIT) laws to speed up renewable energy production have been introduced in several countries e.g. the UK, Australia, several US states, among them California, as well as in Ontario (Canada), with the support of the World Future Council. In establishing the Alliance for Renewable Energy, the World Future Council has created a coalition to spread renewable energies and contributed to the implementation of Feed-in Tariffs in the United States.
- Nuclear Abolition Forum
With the support of the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Sergio Duarte, the World Future Council launched in 2011 the Nuclear Abolition Forum – a joint-project of 8 leading organizations in the disarmament field, hosted by the WFC. The Forum aims to examine critique and debate key nuclear disarmament issues, thereby paving the way for building the framework for achieving and sustaining a nuclear weapon-free world. To this end, it offers a website for posting articles and discussing key nuclear abolition aspects and initiatives, and a periodical which will focus on specific nuclear disarmament themes or elements.
- Implementing the rights of persons with disabilities
The World Future Council has undertaken research on exemplary laws and policies implementing the rights of persons with disabilities. Together with the Essl Foundation, the WFC gathered more than 240 decision-makers from 34 countries at the first International Conference on Good Policies for Persons with Disabilities in January 2012 in Vienna, closed with the keynote speech of Dr Christian Strohal, Vice-President of the UN Human Rights Council. The WFC and the Essl Foundation currently agreed a five-year cooperation, under the name “Zero Project”.
- African Renewable Energy Alliance
The World Future Council founded the African Renewable Energy Alliance (AREA) in October 2009. It is a network comprising about 760 members from 70 countries (in February 2012). In order to promote renewable energies in Africa, AREA has co-organized international conferences and meetings on “Renewable Energy for Sustainable African Development” in South Africa, Ghana, Cape Verde, Nigeria and Morocco.
- Campaign for Ombudspersons for Future Generations
The WFC has embarked on a Campaign for Ombudspersons for Future Generations on all governance levels. For the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or ‘Rio+20’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012 the WFC was calling for the establishment of Ombudspersons for Future Generations, as a concrete solution under the second theme of the Summit ‘Institutional Framework for Sustainable Development’. VIMEO Video on High Commissioner for Future Generations
- FuturePolicy.org
The internet platform www.futurepolicy.org presents political solutions and assists decision-makers in developing and implementing future just policies. It now contains policies, for example on renewable energies, energy efficiency, sustainable cities and food production in the era of climate change, that have been promoted in WFC publications, films and hearings.
Read more about this topic: World Future Council
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“As life developed, I faced each problem as it came along. As my activities and work broadened and reached out, I never tried to shirk. I tried never to evade an issue. When I found I had something to do—I just did it.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)