Climate Change
Governments don’t operate in a vacuum. Every one of us will need to think about how we can use the leverage we can apply in our multiple roles as citizens, employers or employees, investors and, critically, voters, not simply as consumers.

Consumers
They can be mobilised for short periods of time. But for sustained action we need concerted, effective and long-term action by business, by investors and governments.

Greendex
Earlier this year, The National Geographic Society and Canada’s GlobeScan released the second annual “Greendex” of sustainable consumption patterns across 17 countries. A total of 65 lifestyle choices of consumers are included in the index, covering areas as diverse as energy use, transportation, housing, food and product purchases. Consumption as measured by the Greendex is calculated both in terms of the choices consumers actively make – such as repairing, rather than replacing items, using cold water to wash laundry, or choosing green products rather than environmentally unfriendly ones – and choices that are controlled more by their circumstances – such as the climate they live in or the availability of green products or public transport.

Do you really know how your personal choices are adding up? What about the choices of your fellow citizens? How well are people around the globe adopting behaviors that can make the world a more environmentally sustainable place? How have they changed over the past year?

Find out more on The National Geographic “Greendex”-website

GoodGuide
A new application (“app”) that runs on Apple’s iPhone, which will allow users to scan products using a phone fitted with a barcode scanner. The system, which is available from GoodGuide is free and will give iPhone-users a better sense of their environmental footprints, if they are interested enough to look beyond the packaging and the price-tag.

Whether our future turns out to be more globalisation or more localisation,  better-informed consumers have the potential to be important drivers of business and government action on climate change.

Based on “Can consumers save our climate?”
– an article published by John Elkington and openDemocracy.net
under a Creative Commons licence.