Doing More with Less: Ensuring Sustainable Consumption and Production (part of the project: Still Only One Earth - Sustainable Consumption and Production. A paper marking 50 years of UN environmental diplomacy)

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Abstract

Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns (SCP) has been one of the greatest global challenges over the past fifty years.

With the adoption of Sustainable Development Goal 12, “Ensure sustainable consumption and production,” there is an opportunity to embed SCP as a systems wide goal for all societies, with a recognition that key drivers and solutions lie in our economic, financial and governance decision-making.

Policymakers need to transform today’s “linear” material flows—from extraction to use and disposal—to “circular” ones through intelligent design of products.

Until the macro-level economic debate on value is resolved in favour of socioecological regeneration, it will be difficult to see how market and pricing mechanisms applied to biodiversity, forests, and land can produce long-term shifts in consumption practices.

The debate on the transition to wellbeing economies—including a re-balancing of private in favour of public consumption in policy priorities—will be decisive
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 17 Aug 2021

Keywords

  • United Nations
  • sustainable consumption
  • growth

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