Futures Thinking for 21st Century Leadership with Prof Nick King

Nick King,
Prof.

Prof Nicholas King is an independent researcher and consultant with 30 years’ experience in global environmental change, including mainstreaming environment and climate change considerations into development planning and practice. Currently Nick consults and teaches on global change and futures thinking, scenarios development, and leadership needs for the 21st century. He works with governments, business, NGOs and local communities, facilitating ‘future-proofing’ of policies and programmes, incorporating sustainability, risk, and resilience considerations into strategic planning. Nick has a Masters in Ecology, PhD in Geography, and an LLM in International Environmental Law. He holds an Extraordinary Professorship at North-West University and a part-time faculty post at the University of Stellenbosch Business School where he facilitates the Sustainable Leadership module on the Executive Development Programme. Nick’s experience includes assessment of environment and development policy, laws and management in numerous countries, and participation on both governmental and non-governmental delegations to international treaty negotiations including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC). He was a Review Editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, and has played lead roles in several IPBES assessments, including in scoping the new Transformative Change Assessment, as well as a Review Editor for the Africa Regional Assessment. He served as Co-Chair of the Science & Policy Advisory Panel for UNEP’s 6th Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-6) from 2015 – 2019 (https://www.unep.org/resources/global-environment-outlook-6), and has just been appointed to Co-Chair the Science Advisory Panel for GEO-7, development of which will run through to 2026. Nick also served on the Science Advisory Panel of UNEP’s Global Synthesis Report launched by the UN Secretary General in February 2021 under the title Making Peace with Nature (https://www.unep.org/resources/making-peace-nature), and has just been appointed as one of only 20 experts worldwide to the new Global Foresight Expert Panel being established by UNEP and the International Science Council to draft a Global Foresight Report for the UN General Assembly’s “Summit of the Future” in 2024. His current work focusses increasingly on inter-generational equity and the solutions pathways of emergent futures, analysing the latest global change trends and interpreting what future lifestyles may look like for today’s youth and future generations in the face of these changes (see for example: Climate Change Implications for SA’s Youth: What will basic lifestyles and services look like from 2021 onwards, through 2030, 2040, and beyond for today’s children and future generations (https://cer.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Nick-King-Report-Final.pdf). Nick has given over 100 presentations, radio and TV interviews and facilitated training workshops on addressing the climate crisis together with all compounding trends, including biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, human demographics, economics, and over-consumptive lifestyles, and the ensuing ‘polycrisis of the Anthropocene’, to a broad array of audiences.