Ten steps to a better world

Forum for the Future is an exciting place. We’re always involved in a range of ambitious projects - but our work is so varied it’s sometimes hard to sum up what we do.

That’s why we’ve pulled together an overview of 10 of the projects we were most proud of in 2008 illustrating the range and variety of our work with leading companies, government and public sector organisations to encourage sustainable development.

We aim to work on transformational projects where our efforts will have maximum impact. We drew up guidance to help public organisations spend their money in ways which will help build a sustainable future – that’s £160 billion of purchasing in the UK alone.

We pride ourselves on innovation and our positive, practical solutions. We helped AkzoNobel study the life-cycle of their paint and how to make it more environmentally friendly. In the process we developed a tool which can help any company trying to develop more sustainable products. Our i-team project has shown how councils can use people-centred innovation to develop better, more sustainable services.

We also aim to help organisations understand what the future may hold and how, by operating more sustainably, they can future-proof themselves against threats like climate change and dwindling resources. Our Climate Futures study, developed with HPLabs, looked at how climate change may shape our world politically, economically and psychologically. Ithasattracted worldwide attention and has become our most downloaded report ever.

We need leaders with vision and courage to drive forward the sustainability agenda. Developing these leaders is another key theme runningthrough our work. Well over 100 students have graduated from our Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development since 1996 and we run a variety of other leadership programmes.Good communications are also vital, to build awareness of the environmental challenges facing us, to mobilise action and spread best practice. Our annual Sustainable Cities Index aims to drive change by assessing our biggest cities performance on sustainability and setting a benchmark against which city leaders can track their progress. Almost 50% of all farmers are aware of Farming Futures, the project we coordinate for a partnership of farming bodies and Defra, which gets them up to speed on how climate change will affect their business and what they can do about it; the website has been judged the best for information on this topic by Farmers Weekly.

An increasing amount of our work is outside the UK, and our growing international focus is mirrored by our magazine Green Futures, which is mid-way through a series on sustainability in the world’s major emerging economies including India, China, Mexico and Brazil.

We’re good at bringing different players together to achieve change. We’ve embarked on a 10-year programme aiming to make Bristol one of the world’s greenest cities and the region a model of sustainability, working with the government, local authorities, companies, universities and other sustainability organisations.

And we’re also good at incubating projects which have the scope to become much bigger. Last year we launched the London Sustainability Exchange as an independent charity, dedicated to reducing the capital’s environmental footprint and improving the life of its citizens.

In each of these 10 examples we’ve tried to quantify the impact our work has made. Sometimes this is easy - our work with AkzoNobel led to the launch of Ecosure, the high quality sustainable paint. Sometimes it’s harder to pin down, as with our efforts to put climate change adaptation on the agenda for Copenhagen.

And some of our work goes on behind closed doors - helping companies understand why sustainability makes good business sense and embed it in their operations. Finlays embraced sustainability as “an unchallenged part of the company’s future” after we helped it explore the future risks and opportunities facing its Kenyan flower and vegetable business. For now, the details remain confidential.

We’re continuing some of these projects in 2009 and developing others which respond to the rapidly changing market conditions. Incoming weeks,watch out for Jonathon Porritt’s new publication Living Within Our Means which shows how the economic and ecological crises are both rooted in the same unsustainable model of capitalism. And the FT will be announcing the winner of our global competition for climate change innovation, with a $75,000 prize sponsored by HP.