“The fact is that we have more and more people all around the world living in urban areas, so this is where we have to focus on some work. And this is where I think it’s just a necessity. We’re going to have possibly nine billion people, we’re going to go from six to nine, in a matter of forty years. A of them are going to be living in cities, so we’d better build cities that are going to be as sustainable as we can make them.”

Christine Loh, Former Hong Kong Legislator and Founder of the Citizens Party

“The requirements of sustainable development are a change, sometimes a transformative change, in our mindsets, in our value systems, in our basic behavioral patterns. In our production systems, in our consumption patterns, and so on. Those are things people find hard to change. In the case of production systems, partly because they have invested in the old ones, which makes it costly. In the case of consumption patterns, they are so used to them that they think that is the only good way to go. It will actually require a redefinition of what is a good life.”

Ashok Khosla, Chairman of Development Alternatives New Delhi and President of IUCN

“You can compare Earth Charter to a constitution for a nation state. If you want to found a democracy, you need a constitution. It is not only a formal system of voting, it’s also your ambitions as a people, as a state. The very first step is this conviction. We are as it were reborn, reborn to understand that we all belong to one dimension, let’s say, peoples all around the world, are also related. And the second point is that we better understand that the challenges we have to face, whether it is poverty, or discrimination, or climate change, are interconnected.”

Ruud Lubbers, Economist and Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands

“One of the remarkable starting points is to recognize that world development since industrialization has occurred under the presumption that we can exploit nature and that we can predict the impacts and outcomes of that exploitation. And that we believe that nature changes in very incremental, linear and predictable ways. What we’re learning very rapidly is that that’s not correct. That in fact, our exploitation in nature has potentially very dramatic non-linear changes, that we can cross thresholds with potential very rapid, irreversible and catastrophic impacts.”

Johan Rockström, Professor in Natural Resources Management

“When you develop a game you are inventing stuff that has never existed before. We are inventing not only the technology, not only the story, but also how we are going to implement this and what our first step is. With the game about the Milo character that we are working on at the moment it really started with our ability to create what we felt was a real living boy. That is how it started: how can we create something that feels alive? How will you be able to interact with that living thing? Will you be able to use your voice? Will you be able to give things to Milo? It started like that, rather than with thinking about the first scene in the story. It started with the boy being alive.”

Peter Molyneux, Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios

“The conventional view is that we are destroying our ecosystems with our technology and we should be fearful about it. We should gradually have laws and learn to consider the ecosystems in the equation. But this approach obviously falls short. Why don’t we have the awareness of turning off an electric bulb whenever we are not using it? This requires a different kind of relationship with nature. Nature is important not only because of fear that global warming is going to destroy all of us. The fear drive must be overruled by another drive which the new paradigm gives, which is the drive of love. I want to save the environment because I love the environment. Because the environment is me. It’s the same being.”

Amit Goswami, Professor of Physics and Quantum Activist

“There’s this concept of the precautionary principle, which says that whenever society is making a decision around the deployment of a technology, it should look closely at the possibility of a negative result. The opposite argument, the proactionary principle, says that as long as you can show that a good outcome will happen, then go ahead and do it. What struck me was that there’s room for another approach and I started to call it the reversibility principle. Taking in both arguments around precaution and proaction, the best strategy when deploying a new technology is to design that technology from the outset in a way to maximize the potential to pull back if you recognize a potentially critical problem.”

Jamais Cascio, Environmental and Ethical Futurist

“The fifth era of social commerce will have elements of collaboration, crowd sourcing, and also there will be a big shift to the influencers within a community, they will define more of the product and they will play a more integral role. There’s going to be other shifts too. In the most radical future PR agencies, interactive agencies, digital agencies could actually start representing the communities and go to the brand and say: ‘I’m representing my client, this community. Would you like to bid for their business?’”

Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist and Senior Analyst at Forrester Research