New Danish green think tank off to a flying start

CONCITO, Denmark’s green think tank, met this week for the first common council meeting since its establishment 8 months ago. The think tank's primary target is first and foremost to present scenarios and analyses of the opportunities for sustainable development. And, as the climate ambassadors point out, what happens when these opportunities are not being exploited.

During the past eight months, CONCITO has produced reports and outlined scenarios within all the major current fields of the environment. The results have been communicated directly to decision makers in political, private and public spheres. The reports are the result of work conducted in CONCITO’s subgroups.

At the council meeting Chair Martin Lidegaard expressed his happiness with the large engagement and voluntary work that CONCITO deeply depends on: ”It has, to put it bluntly, been both impressive and very encouraging to see how many hours our members have chosen to put into CONCITO,” he says.

What gives CONCITO strength, is, to a very high extent, the long row of council members that put in unpaid hours to create awareness and knowledge about a sustainable future. As the head of a consulting engineer company said with a broad smile, ”As head of a consultancy it can be a little hard to explain to your employees why we are paying 5,000 DKK to be allowed to do unpaid work for CONCITO.”

Martin Lidegaard gave one of the answers to this question when he pointed out that it seems private businesses demonstrate a greater willingness to act than the Danish Parliament (the Folketing) and EU.

There is still much yet to be done for CONCITO. One of the very exciting initiatives is the 10 “Climate-nerd programmes” which were on air in October and November at DR1. At the same time, CONCITO, FDB, The Danish Society for Nature Conservation and Experimentarium are giving away 50,000 free schoolbooks about climate for the medium level in primary and lower secondary schools. To follow up in classrooms, 100 climate ambassadors will be educated as part of a climate embassy. The target is to extend the initiative to businesses and youth educations in Denmark and the rest of Europe.