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