2024 Tomorrow's World
Challenge Overview
This challenge is now complete. Challenges for June 2025 will be announced in January 2025.
We are living in a time that is often referred to as ‘The Anthropocene’, when humans have caused huge changes to our planet. But this capacity for change may suggest that we also have the knowledge and tools to understand what is happening, and the choice about how to use them to shape our future.
“If working apart we are a force powerful to destabilise our planet, surely working together we are powerful enough to save it…in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.” (Sir David Attenborough COP26 2021).
Recent and on-going climate events have emphasised the need for urgent action to mitigate further change and protect biodiversity, but they have also shown us that we need to live differently in response to our changing world.
Through this challenge we will explore what our sustainable future may look like and, the steps we can take to secure it. What could our lives, our communities, and our relationship with nature and each other be like in 2050, and what can we do now to secure that future?
We will invite engaging speakers and practitioners with wide ranging experience to share their thoughts and ideas with you, and we will provide lots of opportunities for you to discuss and share your own ideas within the challenge.
We will be exploring the opportunities that changes in social norms, developments in technology (including AI), rethinking of societal structures may present, and asking how they may support us. As we scan the horizon, this is our opportunity to build a more just, equitable, sustainable world!
To address this challenge, we need diverse points of view and expertise. Whatever programme of study you are following, we welcome your perspectives, thoughts and ideas to address this challenge.
This challenge will only run on the Penryn Campus.
Our enquiry groups will explore wide ranging issues:
How will households and local communities respond to the challenges we will be facing? What role can developing technology play in transforming our lives and our relationship with our environment?
How will change impact on our health and wellbeing? Can it support more equitable lifestyles to provide good health for all? Can we reduce our dependency on treatment, by shifts to living better and more sustainably?
How will our relationship with nature need to change to ensure we maintain our complex natural ecosystem – both green and blue? Should we live more closely with nature or does nature need to be protected from us?
What will future communities look like? How should our cities/towns/communities be designed, built, and managed? How do we create resilience both in the infrastructure but also in the community?
The human race has been around for about 200, 000 years a typical mammalian species, lives about 2 million years.
“If the human race were a single individual, she would be just 10 years old today.” (Prof Will MacAskill)
Is it any wonder, this child is making mistakes, how can we guide/help/support this child to make better decisions?
Meet the Academic Leads
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Meet our speakers
Hugo Tagholm
Hugo is a surfer, campaigner, and environmentalist.
He currently heads up the global marine conservation NGO Oceana in the UK.
He previously led the NGO Surfers Against Sewage, campaigning from the beach front to the front benches of Parliament. Hugo founded the Global Wave Conference, Plastic Free Communities movement, the Million Mile Beach Clean & Safer Seas Service and has been instrumental in exposing water company sewage pollution and the plastic pollution crisis.
Hugo was awarded a Doctorate of Science by Exeter University for his services to the marine environment; Environmentalist of the Year 2021 by Save the Waves; featured in the ENDS Report 2023 Campaigning Power List, and has been shortlisted as Leader of the Year in the 2023 Purpose Awards.
Hugo is on the Board of Directors for the Save the Waves Coalition and writes for Oceanographic Magazine. He is a regular speaker and host at ocean and environmental events, and frequent commentator in the media featuring in the Guardian, the Times, Channel 4 News, Sky News, the BBC and many other channels over the years.
He lives in and works from Cornwall in the UK.
You can follow Hugo on Twitter at @hugoSAS
Meet our youth panel
Raised in California by Peruvian and Lebanese immigrants, I've dedicated myself to serving displaced and marginalized communities: from working with refugees in Greece at the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis to my work at UNICEF advocating for displaced families in the first year of COVID-19.
Recently, I've been researching and building citizen science programs, such as the San Francisco Surfrider Foundation's first Blue Water Task Force, a community-led water quality monitoring lab. My goal is to continue utilizing citizen science to support more communities worldwide facing environmental health challenges, such as fishers impacted by the La Pampilla oil spill in Peru.
SF Surfrider Foundation's instagram: @surfridersf. My personal instagram where I am starting to post about citizen science broadly and what I'm specifically working on: @communitysciencelab
My field is mainly voluntary work and rescues that involved in the marine environment.
I started my work four years ago in 2020 with the help of my dad. And I still continue to volunteer in the marine enviroment.
My dad has a voluntary team named DVDT (Dubai Voluntary Diving Team) and I'm a part of the team. We usually go on weekly trips in the oceans of the UAE to preserve the marine enviroment. Our work mainly focuses on collecting anything that harms the enviroment, for example nets, ropes, plastic waste, etc, and recycle all of the waste. We even take the ropes that we recovered to hand them out to the local fishermen. I
I have over 2000+ voluntary hours with a big passion for diving for the sake of the enviroment.
I belive that if everyone does their part in keeping the enviroment clean we would end up with a more sustainable and clean enviroment.
Phil Green (he/him) is a community activist working in the realms of climate justice and participatory democracy. He is currently Vice President of the Falmouth and Exeter Students’ Union.
Annabel Page is a 20 year old PPE student at the University of Exeter who competes for the UK at Stand Up Paddleboarding. She has a personal interest in sustainability within water sports and the interaction between ocean and human health evident in her involvement with Healthcare Ocean.
