(PRWEB UK) 28 May 2015

Over the next two weeks, 250 of the world’s most innovative minds will meet in eight cities to tackle five major challenges to global resilience and sustainability. As part of the Global Opportunity Network, these experts will identify and map sustainable opportunities to be found in these global risks. After a vetting process, the results will be published in a publicly available report. The initiative for this has been taken by the UN Global Compact, DNV GL and the Monday Morning Global Institute.

“With this report, the partners aim to demonstrate how global sustainability challenges and risks can be seen as opportunities,” says Bjorn K. Haugland, Chief Sustainability Officer at DNV GL. “The work provides an open innovation platform where stakeholders worldwide can explore and capture sustainability opportunities and solutions. The most exciting new opportunities go into the Global Opportunity Report.”

The eight Opportunity Panels will consist of experts from business, public offices and civil society. They will identify opportunities related to five specific risks: resistance to lifesaving medicine, the global food crisis, accelerating transport emissions, the loss of ocean biodiversity and a generation wasted on youth unemployment. The first panel will be held in San Francisco on 29 May, followed by panels in Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Oslo, Abu Dhabi, London, Delhi and Beijing.

“We need the input from all sectors to help investment areas with the promise of creating long-term value for society, not just short-term profit,” adds Erik Rasmussen, Founder and CEO of Monday Morning Global Institute. “We don’t stop at mapping the opportunities. The Global Opportunity Report also rates the opportunities in a large survey of public and private leaders worldwide. This rating helps identify the areas where strong alliances to bring about sustainable action can most likely be forged.”

Haugland and Rasmussen believe it is no longer enough to manage risk on an ongoing basis. Rather, risks require systematic and comprehensive responses. It is from this mindset that a myriad of opportunities for building better societies and businesses arise.

“Businesses are responding to the global context, moving beyond their basic responsibilities and going into a strategic opportunity space. Indeed, more and more companies are seeing global challenges as opportunities” says Georg Kell, Executive Director, UN Global Compact. He concludes, “The Global Opportunity Report and Network strive to demonstrate that in every risk there is opportunity, and that every opportunity is sustainable, meaning that opportunities are chances to create long-term value, not just short term profit.”

After identifying a set of sustainable responses to the risks, the Global Opportunity Network will survey over 5,000 public and private sector leaders from around the world to rank the opportunities. The resulting guide to the greatest global opportunities of the coming year will be published in the Global Opportunity Report in February 2016.

See the venues for the panels in the attachment.

About the Global Opportunity Network:

The Global Opportunity Network and Report are the products of collaboration between DNV GL, UN Global Compact and Monday Morning. As the partners behind this initiative, we share a vision of a safer and more sustainable world and wish to inspire collaboration and action towards making it a reality.

About the Partners:

DNV GL: Driven by the purpose of safeguarding life, property and the environment, DNV GL enables organizations to advance the safety and sustainability of their business. Operating in more than 100 countries, DNV GL’s 16,000 professionals are dedicated to helping our customers in the maritime, oil & gas, energy and other industries to make the world safer, smarter and greener.

Monday Morning is Scandinavia’s largest independent innovation tank, having worked on innovating societies for 25 years. The core of Monday Morning’s work is identifying new insights and building resilient societies. Monday Morning Global Institute brings Monday Morning’s experience with changing agendas and deep knowledge of innovating societies to the global debate on sustainability.

UN Global Compact is a call to companies everywhere to voluntarily align their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment, and anticorruption, and to take action in support of UN goals and issues. Launched in 2000, it is the largest corporate-sustainability initiative in the world—with more than 12,000 signatories from business and key stakeholder groups in 150 countries, and more than 80 local networks.

Resources:

For more Information, please visit http://www.globalopportunitynetwork.org

Enquiries:

For further information on the Global Opportunity Report and network please contact:

Marianne Haar, Project Director, Monday Morning Global Institute

maha(at)mm(dot)dk / +45 3164 1010

Media requests:

Stuart Brewer, Group Media Manager DNV GL Group

stuart.d.brewer(at)dnvgl(dot)com / + 47 915 22 360

Marianne Haahr Project Director, Monday Morning Global Institute

[email protected] / +45 31 64 10 10

Carrie Hall, Head of Communications & Information, UN Global Compact                                                         [email protected] / +1 917 367 5232






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