Global Excellence Awards 2018

154 Acquisition International - Global Excellence Awards 2018 6 Acquis tion International - Issue 10 2018 With the earth rapidly running out of resources, We Don’t Have Time is a movement and a technology start up, which leverages the power of social media to hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change. CEO and Founder Ingmar Rentzhog provides us with a fascinating insight into this dynamic organisation, which recently won the Award for Excellence in Climate Change Action - Social Networking in our prestigious 2018 Global Excellence Awards. ince it first began in 2017, We Don’t Have Time has worked to develop understanding and acknowledgment of the global climate change crisis we are seeing. Ingmar explores the issue and how his organisation is working to drive awareness and inform the public through technology. “Here at We Don’t Have Time, our focus is on being an essential part of the solution to the most important challenge of our time: the climate crisis. We are already seeing it, having reached 1-degree temperature rises, extreme weather, droughts, wildfires and floods. In Sweden, where I come from, the summer of 2018 was the hottest on record. This was nice for those of us who were on vacation but devastating for farmers and those who were affected by the wildfires. Crop production was the lowest in 25 years and just like in California and Greece, we had large wildfires that were extremely difficult to contain. “This is just a first taste of what we can expect in the future. Most scientists agree that it’s too late to reach the Paris agreement’s lower limit of 1.5 degrees. If Company: WeDontHaveTime AB (publ) Name: Ingmar Rentzhog Address: Stockholm, Sweden, [email protected] Web: www.wedonthavetime.org Using Social Media To Create Social Change S 1809AI06 we work real hard we might reach the upper limit of 2 degrees. To put this in perspective, during the last ice age the temperature was 4 degrees lower than the pre-industrial average. Canada was nearly completely covered by ice, as well as the northern part of the United States. Going half-way in the other direction, towards a world that is half as hot as the world was cold during the ice age, will not be a walk in the park. Large parts of the world will become inhabitable. Going further above 2 degrees will be even worse, and if the process becomes self-reinforcing, for instance through the release of methane gas trapped in the seas and the tundra, we might be on a quick path towards a completely inhabitable world. Therefore, We Don’t Have Time to wait, we need to act now to, at the very least, keep us within the 2-degree limit.” To raise awareness, the firm is working to develop an innovative platform designed to drive global understanding and increase public participation in activities such as recycling and waste reduction. Ingmar discusses his organisation’s plans in greater detail. “Clearly political and economic elites are not taking the climate crisis and the threat against our ecosystems seriously enough, or we would not be where we are today. We cannot trust that political leaders, government officials and financial stakeholders will do enough by themselves – the challenge is too great, the catastrophe too imminent. We believe that real change only will come if a movement of ordinary citizens from all over the world demands change. We must push them, ourselves, and our peers, to do much more, and faster. By building the world’s largest social media platform focused on climate change, we can be a central part of this movement. We want our platform to be the place where people and organizations who share our conviction that immediate action is needed can come together and propel real change. “As such, We Don’t Have Time will be the first global, social media platform with a cause. An essential and unique element of our platform is that it will be designed to empower our users such that their actions on the platform have a direct influence on stakeholders. If a large enough number of users