Future 500

Energy/climatefuture 500 views the energy transition as a critical thread across all the sustainability projects in which we engage. To that end, our organization continuously seeks to build partnerships with energy companies and energy activists. We work across several energy sectors including, but not limited to: coal, natural gas, oil refining and exploration, and biofuels. We believe that smart, comprehensive energy policy can help drive systemic change down the supply chain. We believe that a price on carbon is an economic, security, fiscal, and environmental imperative. To help drive this effort, we have crafted two core policy principles that can unite the cross-sectoral political support needed for climate policy that is friendly to people, the economy, and the environment. Future 500 has brought together companies, ngos, and investors, and philanthropists to support this policy. We see the energy transition toward a low-carbon Future as a dynamic and evolving arena where we seek to play an important role in connecting corporations and their stakeholders. We believe that direct engagement will help us solve some of the most pressing energy issues facing our society.

People/powerwe face a Future of increasing ecological and economic deficits around the planet. Concurrently, we are amidst a global revolution transforming every aspect of our lives, causing significant social change. The agent of this revolution is a new family of technologies - broadband, the internet, microchips, and software support, ai and advance data measurement and analytics - that draws the world together into a single, coextensive whole for the first time. By unleashing the innovative capacity of ngos and corporations to use technology for good, we have the potential to reverse these deficits toward the betterment of people, planet and profit.

Materials/supply chainsince our inception, Future 500 has been at the forefront of recycling policy and materials stewardship. In fact, our engagement model pulls from the success of a corporate-ngo alliance built by our founder to pass the ca bottle bill. As we look to the Future, we acknowledge that the us needs a more comprehensive, circular economy structure that encompasses broader waste stream and helps us improve resource recovery and reuse. Future 500 has progressed several process to drive innovative waste management policies focused on extended producer responsibility (epr) policy, a proven recycling structure implemented in dozens of countries across the globe. What might such a policy mean for the united states? How should states continue to experiment with the policy to test effectiveness and scale from there to a federal solution that creates a national model rather than a patchwork of state policies.

Food/wateras the planet grows more crowded and affluent, protecting the universal human right to safe food and clean, plentiful water is straining the capabilities of our natural resources. This competition for resources is illuminating the interconnectedness of the food, water and energy sectors. Actions taken in one area inherently impact the other two: the agriculture and energy industries are the largest global consumers of fresh water; transporting and heating water requires enormous amounts of energy; energy resource extraction reduces available land for food production and may contaminate local water sources. More than ever, sustaining our food and water supplies requires integrated solutions that reduce externalities and improve efficiency across sectors and geographies. Toward this end, Future 500 works with a broad range of stakeholders to advance systemic solutions at this critical nexus of food, water and energy. We align stakeholders to explore approaches that leverage corporate supply chain and political power to drive improvements in resource quality and quantity.