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The Founding Congress of the World Future Council (WFC) was celebrated at the Hamburg Town Hall in mid-May 2007, together with the spectacular opening of its permanent co-ordinating secretariat in the city’s dynamic “warehouse-city” area.
Fifty prominent founding members and councilors of the WFC became “guardians of future generations,” elaborating solutions for our planet’s problems, both ecological and social, from fair trade and anti-corruption campaigns to peace education. They include human rights activist Bianca Jagger, environmental activist Vandana Shiva, anti-poverty activist Youssou N’Dour, and Prince El Hassan Bin Talal, the president of the Club of Rome.
Initiator Jakob von Uexküll, a Swedish-German national and philanthropist and the man who established the Right Livelihood Award, aka the Alternative Nobel Prize, collaborated with author, environmental expert and film-maker Herbert Girardet in launching this ambitious global cooperation, after 2 years of intense preparation.
Top priority will be given to the protection of world climate, including the question of how to achieve sustainable “climate justice” between the different parts of the world and the various degrees of imminent threats and dangers posed by climate change.
Von Uexküll is convinced that “the power of ethics” should not be underestimated: “We can inspire and motivate, prepare international agreements and create model legislation,” he said. The WFC will try to reach national parliaments all over the world via e-Parliament, the already existing global online network of democratically elected parliamentarians. “Our first in a series of ongoing campaigns,” von Uexküll explained in Hamburg, “will be on tackling global climate change. Laws such as the German Renewable Energy Feed-In legislation need to be adopted as soon as possible by all industrialized nations.”
This German law, established in April 2000 by the then-Red-Green-Government, has been promoting the use of renewable energy. A fixed remuneration is guaranteed to anybody, individual or company, who is feeding into the public energy supply system any surplus of renewable energy generated from renewable sources such as solar or wind energy, geothermal and hydropower, energy from biomass, etc. The aims of this legislation are to avoid international conflicts about fossil fuels; an increase in the percentage of renewable energy by to 12.5% by 2010 and 20% by 2020; and a system of sustainable energy supply while maintaining or improving both the protection of climate, nature, the environment and further technological development.
The “Hamburg Call to Action,” published on the occasion of the WFC Founding Congress, stated, “We seek to promote systems and institutions based on equity and justice … We seek equally to overturn policies that violate our future … We have decided to focus first on climate change, because this is no longer just an environmental issue. It touches every area of our lives: peace, security, human rights, poverty, hunger, health, mass migration, economics.”
Thus, the WFC might be a natural ally of the Global Council for Climate Change, established by Lehman Brothers in February 2007, as a service to the growing number of the investment bank’s customers who are interested in successful business ideas resulting from environmentally conscious policies. The political and economic pressure that Wall Street and NGOs like the WFC are putting on the Bush government is increasing.
Welcome to this new and vital endeavor!
Lore Schultz-Wild is a German journalist, author, and former general secretary of the European Writers Congress. She lives in Munich and can be reached at
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LINKS
The World Future Council (WFC) - Long-term thinking for today’s world
Hamburg’s “Warehouse City”
e-parliament – Democracy for Humanity
German Renewable Feed-in Legislation
Hamburg Call to Action
(direct PDF download here)
Right Livelihood Award (RLA) - The prize for outstanding vision and work on behalf of our planet and its people
Lehman Brothers, “The Business of Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities” (direct PDF download)
“Lehman Brothers Creates New Climate Change Post” (direct PDF download of press release)
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