This report is intended to catalyse debate on current approaches to tackling a wide range of challenges – including global poverty, climate change and biodiversity loss. Whatever the success of civil society organisations in beginning to address such challenges, these often seem to be intractable or worsening. Throughout this report such challenges are referred to, collectively, as ‘bigger-than-self’ problems [Section...
At its heart, global warming is a cognitive and behavior change challenge. Public support for taking action to address global warming is declining just as it is needed most to implement emission reductions and climate preparedness programs and push for new policies. Even if new climate policies are enacted, in the short term they are unlikely to stabilize emissions due...
The comfortable perception that global environmental challenges can be met through marginal lifestyle changes no longer bears scrutiny. The cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be a marginal collective improvement in environmental impact. Yet we live at a time when we need urgent and ambitious changes. If those in government, business...
The epochal scale of today’s environmental challenges is now beyond serious scientific dispute. Awareness of the scale of these challenges grows ever greater – in the case of climate change, it seems that the prognoses of climatologists grow yet more urgent on an almost weekly basis. And as this awareness grows, so too does our understanding of the gulf between...
As our understanding of the scale of environmental challenges deepens, so we are also forced to contemplate the inadequacy of the current responses to these challenges. By and large, these responses retreat from engaging the values that underpin our decisions as citizens, voters and consumers: mainstream approaches to tackling environmental threats do not question the dominance of today’s individualistic and...
