Photograph courtesy of edie
The Conservation Volunteers President Jonathon Porritt accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award at the edie Sustainability Leaders Awards 2020 in London last week (5th February).
Jonathon Porritt has been the President of TCV since 2014, as well as being the co-founder of Forum for the Future and an eminent writer, broadcaster and commentator on sustainable development. Porritt received a CBE in 2000 for services to environmental protection.
In his acceptance speech, Porritt spoke about the need to remain hopeful about the technological advancements that are being made in order to make our planet more sustainable.
2020 is an extraordinarily rare inflexion point in the history of humankind; not just in the world of corporate sustainability, not just in the UK, but in the history of humankind.
There are these incredibly exciting converging elements in our lives that give us some prospect of authentic hope…which really could change things in an astonishingly short period of time.
Jonathon Porritt
Porritt also praised young people for immerging themselves into the climate crisis agenda in a way that very few people thought was likely to happen.
A symbolic representation of this of course moving from that single person, Greta Thunberg, sitting outside the Swedish parliament with her homemade sign “School strike for the climate”, all the way through to the end of 2019; 7 million young people on the streets of 106 different cities around the world. That is the fastest ever progressive social movement the world has ever seen.
Jonathon Porritt
Porritt discussed the need to ‘re-carbonise’ the Earth, by firstly stopping the release of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and then to work in order to re-carbonise by taking out the carbon-dioxide currently in the atmosphere but using our natural resources (forests, soils, wetlands etc.) as well as technological advancements and science.
Congratulations Jonathon from all at TCV on your award.