St. Gallen, 8 October 2012 Today the reader for the “when will they start listening to us” workshop has been published. WRF Secretariat and the Swiss Academy of Arts and Sciences are organising this multidisciplinary workshop during the upcoming World Resources Forum, October 23, 2012, in Beijng, China. Its aim is to explore the question why the sense of urgency for achieving more resource efficiency still has not reached mainstream society, despite decades of solid technological and economic analyses.

“Progress is breathtakingly slow”, says Bas de Leeuw, who refers to reports such as Limits to Growth, “dating back several decades”. He will moderate the event, chaired by Swiss Academy of Arts and Sciences Prof. Dr. Heinz Gutscher.

Even though policy reports have been identifying the ways and means for achieving drastic progress towards increasing resource productivity the sense of urgency for such policies is not comparable to the attention for other societal challenges and crises, such as financial and economic issues. The workshop explores the question why this sense of urgency has not reached mainstream politicians, business and individual households.

More details about the workshop (agenda, outline) are now available, as well as the workshop reader. The workshop is a follow-up of recommendations of WRF 2011, held in Davos last year, described in this article. 

For more info about this or other events in this series write to info@worldresourcesforum.org.