One Planet Future
One Planet Future (OPF) is a joint initiative of the BioRegional Development Group and WWF. It aims to make sustainable living easy, attractive and affordable throughout the world. WWF’s vision of One Planet Future describes changing the ‘defaults’ of our everyday lives – as businesses, citizens and consumers.
As globalisation accelerates, decision-makers will increasingly have to meet that challenge by integrating an awareness of environmental limits into policy making. The UK Sustainable Development Strategy now provides a framework to integrate environmental limits into policy making. However, WWF believes that decision-makers must be given new tools and evidence to enable them to deliver innovative policy solutions to do this. The Ecological Footprint provides such solutions and WWF has launched the Ecological Footprint Programme to provide the evidence, tools and support needed to integrate it into policy development at a national, devolved, regional and local level.
The vision of One Planet Future is a world in which people everywhere can lead happy, healthy lives within their fair share of the Earth’s resources. One Planet Future is based on a set of 10 guiding principles. These are:
- Zero Carbon
- Zero Waste
- Sustainable Transport
- Local and Sustainable Materials
- Local and Sustainable Food
- Sustainable Water
- Natural Habitats and Wildlife
- Culture and Heritage
- Equity and fair Trade
- Health and Happiness
If One Planet Future is to become the norm around the world, it must be affordable and attractive to a diverse range of people and cultures. It must address key human needs including housing, clothing, food, healthcare, education, energy, transport and leisure. One Planet Future must also be easy – few people actually want to live unsustainably. However, it is often too easy to make decisions that have damaging, unsustainable consequences, and too difficult to choose more sustainable options. To live at a one planet level, we need to be able to change the ‘defaults’ of our daily lifestyle decisions to ones which are sustainable .
One Planet Future Campaigns
- WWF's One Million Sustainable Homes campaign, which aims to tackle the harmful effects that our homes have on the environment - visit One Million Sustainable Homes;
- WWF's Climate Change programme and the PowerSwitch! campaign, which envisage a future that leads us away from dependence on fossil fuels in favour of more sustainable and efficient energy sources - visit taking action on climate change;
- the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which WWF played a leading part in establishing - this is an international system for certifying that timber and paper products come from well-managed forests - visit taking action for forests; and
- the WWF-UK Forest & Trade Network, whose members such as Boots, B&Q and Sainsbury's are committed to working with WWF to increase the proportion of responsibly sourced, independently certified forest products in which they trade or consume. Visit: the Forest Trade Network