Sustainable consumption and production
© WWF-Canon / Chris MARAIS
The meeting of leaders’ hearts and minds at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit is considered by many to have been the turning point, acknowledging that unsustainable patterns of production and consumption in industrialised countries are the main cause in the deterioration of the global environment.
The unsustainable nature of global consumption was also a key theme ten years on at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. Within the UK Government, this idea has rapidly gained momentum, and the UK approach was outlined in the Framework for Sustainable Consumption and Production –‘Changing Patterns’ (2003), and now in the more recent UK Sustainable Development Strategy ‘Securing Our Future’ (2005).
So far, work to reform these patterns has focused mainly on the production side of the equation, rather than the consumption side. While there have been gains on the production side, gains made by increasing getting more from less, “resource productivty”, these gains are outweighed by our ever increasing consumption.
© Wolverhampton City Council
To use an example, we are making cars more fuel efficient than ever before, but we are also driving more of them further than we ever have done before. No matter how efficiently we produce resources, and how many more resource efficient products we consume, quite simply we are just consuming too much for the planet to support in the long term, particularly if everyone on the planet becomes wealthier.
It is comforting to think that we can decouple resource use from economic growth. While this is theoretically possible, we have still to prove that this can be achieved – especially in key areas such as household consumption or transport.
In partnership with the Environment Agency, the English Regions, and through advocacy, tools and training and, the Sustainable Consumption and Production Network (SCPNet) is delivering the evidence base to enable regions to tackle the challenge of sustainable consumption and production.