Jonathon PorrittJonathon Porritt, Co-Founder and Programme Director of Forum for the Future, is an eminent writer, broadcaster and commentator on sustainable development. Established in 1996, Forum for the Future is now the UK’s leading sustainable development charity, with 70 staff and over 100 partner organisations, including some of the world’s leading companies.Jonathon was appointed by the Prime Minister as Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission in July 2000. This is the Government’s principal source of independent advice across the whole sustainable development agenda. In addition, he has been a member of the Board of the South West Regional Development Agency since December 1999, and is Co-Director of The Prince of Wales’s Business and Environment Programme which runs Senior Executives’ Seminars in Cambridge, Salzburg, South Africa and the USA. In 2005 he became a Non-Executive Director of Wessex Water, and a Trustee of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. He is also Vice-President of the Socialist Environment Resources Association (SERA).
He was formerly Director of Friends of the Earth (1984-90); co-chair of the Green Party (1980-83) of which he is still a member; chairman of UNED-UK (1993-96); chairman of Sustainability South West, the South West Round Table for Sustainable Development (1999-2001); a Trustee of WWF UK (1991-2005).
December 23rd, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
This is one of the most important books I’ve read for a long time. It’s authoritatively researched, absolutely ‘on the front line’ of the politics of climate change today, profound in its analysis of contemporary capitalism, and hugely impactful in terms of laying out the implications of that kind of ...
December 11th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
I can’t deny that it’s highly entertaining watching the Coalition Government energetically tearing itself to pieces over the future of the economy. You’ve just got to laugh out loud at the wounded indignation of Danny Alexander suddenly waking up to the fact that his ‘close colleague’ at the Treasury...
November 26th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
Summon into your mind, for a moment, the image of a deeply perplexed Ed Davey, late at night, deep in thought, sitting there behind his Secretary of State’s desk in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, staring down at a single large number in a memo from his Permanent Secretary.Strictly confident...
November 19th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
Really good that the Green Ribbon Political Awards have been resuscitated - after quite a long break - and yesterday I handed out the Awards to the deserving winners at the House of Commons.read more...
November 19th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
It’s nearly a month since the EU Commission approved the UK Government’s financial arrangements with EdF to build two nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point. There was always a rather banal inevitability about this decision; despite the fact that the Commission’s initial response had been extremely hostil...
November 5th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
It becomes more and more mystifying why the passage of the Infrastructure Bill has attracted near zero coverage. It has already had around 10 days being debated in the House of Lords, and there’s still a long way to go, but only campaigning journalists like George Monbiot have taken any interest in it...
October 13th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
It’s a long time since I’ve spent a whole week at a conference or event. Bizarrely, life just seems to get even more frantic as I get older, with the available time sliced and allocated in ever more parsimonious packages. So how can I account for spending a week at the recent ‘New Story Summit’ in Findhor...
October 8th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
I spent a very happy morning in Oxford yesterday, chairing a little seminar for ClimateCare on its plans through to 2020, and then celebrating the presentation of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise!read more...
October 7th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
It’s a big day today. The new platform, www.collectively.org, goes live!In some respects, this is the end point of a process that started for me more than three and a half years ago back in 2011, when I began work on “The World We Made”. Off the back of the book, I did a little sustainable innovation...
September 29th, 2014 by Jonathon Porritt
As if it wasn’t bad enough for the BBC to have been fingered as a Fox News lookalike earlier in the year for providing endless platforms for climate change deniers , they’re now caught up in another unholy ‘bias row’ – accused this time as a not-so-secret mouthpiece for the nuclear industry.read more...