A World In Transition
Climate catastrophe is looming, but the future is still ours for the shaping. So what needs to change and how do we change it?
These are the questions that global tech giant Hitachi and innovation design studio Takram set out to answer with Three Transitions for a Human-Nature Recovery. An interactive digital experience designed to outline and explore the systemic shifts necessary to ensure positive futures for the planet’s climate, biodiversity and human life, Three Transitions is the result of a year-long research programme into how we as a society make the industrial, economic and ecological transformations needed to restore the broken human-nature relationship in our time. In November 2021, Hitachi presented the project to an audience of world leaders and the wider public at COP26 in Glasgow.
On 27 January 2022, A World In Transition will bring the Hitachi-Takram team together with leading thinkers and activists in the field of sustainability. During the online event, we’ll discuss diverse perspectives on climate emergency, explore new ways of thinking about transition, and map out the pathways that will lead to better futures for all.
Farhana Yamin is an internationally recognised environmental lawyer, climate change and development policy expert. She has advised leaders and ministers on climate negotiations for 30 years, representing small islands and developing countries and attending nearly every major climate summit since 1991. In addition to founding Track 0, she is a senior advisor to SYSTEMIQ and an FRSA. She was voted number two on the 2020 BBC’s Power List with the judges describing her as a ‘powerhouse of climate justice’ and is active in numerous community-based social initiatives in Camden.
Lucy Siegle is a journalist, broadcaster and eco expert. She is the Observer and Guardian’s Ethical Living columnist, and set up the Observer Ethical Awards in 2005. Lucy regularly appears on television and radio and is The One Show’s (BBC1) resident environment expert. Lucy founded the Green Carpet Challenge with Livia Firth to address consumption and sustainability in the fashion industry and has worked on environment projects with Emma Watson and Ellie Goulding. She is a trustee of marine conservation charity Surfers Against Sewage and a co-host on the podcast So Hot Right Now with wildlife filmmaker Tom Mustill. Previous books include To Die For (2011) and Turning the Tide on Plastic (2018) and her most recent book is Be the Ultimate Friend of the Earth (2022).
Aja Barber is a writer, stylist and consultant whose work deals with the intersections of sustainability and the fashion landscape. Her work builds heavily on ideas behind privilege, wealth inequality, racism, feminism, colonialism and how to fix the fashion industry with all these things in mind. Aja is the author of Consumed: on colonialism, climate change, consumerism & the need for collective change.
Sir Tim Smit is the co-founder and executive vice-chair of the Eden Project, which saw a decommissioned quarry transformed into a cradle of life and a powerful exploration of human dependence on – and part within – the systems of the natural world. Sir Tim is also a director of the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which he ‘discovered’ and restored with John Nelson in 1990, and executive co-chair for Eden Project International, which creates Eden Projects with partners on every inhabited continent.
Yosuke Ushigome is director and creative technologist at Takram – the design innovation studio with bases in Tokyo, London, New York and Shanghai. Winner of the 2018 Swarovski Designers of the Future Award, he is an advocate of transition design – designing for the process of change as well as its outcome – and writes and speaks on the intersection of tech, design and society.
Mikaela Loach is a climate justice activist, co-host of The Yikes Podcast, writer and 5th year medical student. She is one of three claimants who took the UK government to court to challenge the Oil & Gas Association's policy in the North Sea and the subsidies and tax breaks the industry is given by the UK government. Her organizing work and Instagram focuses on highlighting the harm caused by the fossil fuel industry, and the intersections of the climate crisis with oppressive systems such as white supremacy and migrant injustices. You can support the Paid To Pollute court case by visiting paidtopollute.org.uk
Koji Sasaki, PhD is Chief Researcher at Hitachi and Senior Researcher at Keio University. An anthropologist based in Tokyo, he has played key roles in lading projects in migration, urbanism, technology, sustainability and design with academic institutions and creative studios in Japan. For Hitachi, he has provided visions for various anthropologically-informed projects, including Transitions for Sustainable Futures, Three Transitions for a Human-Nature Recovery, and Transition Scenarios for Japan's Carbon Neutrality. He is the author of The Immigrants and Virtues: Historical Ethnography of the Japanese-Brazilian Intellectuals (Nagoya University Press, in Japanese).