Sustainability charity Forum for the Future has launched an interactive digital platform to help businesses collaborate over shared challenges.
The platform, called the Futures Centre, will help decision makers to track trends, share resources and spot opportunities for innovation and collaboration, says Forum for the Future.
The charity believes the hub will help make its expertise in “futures techniques” more accessible. These techniques include trends, scenarios and horizon scanning, and aim to help businesses move beyond day-to-day priorities to consider the potential impacts of longer-term trends, such as climate change and resource scarcity.
Over the past 19 years, Forum for the Future has undertaken “futures” work for a number of companies, including HP, Levi Strauss, Sony and PepsiCo. For example, it assisted Pepsico to identify problems that could arise from its reliance on agriculture, which led the food and beverage multinational to develop the iCrop, a way of increasing crop yields while reducing water use.
The Futures Centre, which operates out of Singapore, will also bring together experts to explore critical issues in more detail through specialist “topic hubs”. The first of these will go live in April and will look at shipping, the charity says.
Meanwhile, an online platform for environmental data has been launched by the Digital Catapult, a national centre for the advancement of digital ideas created by the government body, Innovate UK.
Launching in March, the Environmental Data Exchange will act as a portal for businesses, researchers and members of the public can access environmental data from a wide range of sources, including government departments and the World Bank.
