Sustainable Consumption and Production

Abstract

The draft report has been reviewed by the Nordic Working Group for Sustainable Consumption and Production (HKP) under the Nordic Council of Ministers and by UN Environment. Thank you for your most valuable input. The project group wishes to thank the representatives from a wide range of organisations throughout the Nordic Region for their time and input during interviews-without which this project would not have been possible.

Domestic material consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the EU‐28 countries: Implications for environmental sustainability targets

“…In addition, waste and farming decaying in landfills are other sources of GHG emissions that have yielded a slight increase in recent time. Meanwhile, in 2017 and2018, there was a decline in GHG emissions by 19 and 21% compared with the estimate in1990. Thus, this indicates an outright decline of about 935 million tonnes and 1,018 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO 2 e), thereby placing the EU countries on the pathway to achieving its 2020 target (the goal of reducing GHG emissions by 20 and 40% by 2030 compared to 1990).…”

Environmental Sustainability Perspectives of the Nordic Diet

“…For example, it has been estimated that up to 20% of food bought by the average consumer is thrown away [18]. At the Nordic level, a target of halving the amount of food waste by 2030 has been adopted [72], with concentrated media attention on the subject.…”

Reporting Sustainable Development Goal 12 in the Spanish food retail industry. An analysis based on Global Reporting Initiative performance indicators

“…Although some advances have been made, progress in their implementation has been slow and limited, particularly in areas such as sustainable consumption and production (SCP), mainly addressed in SDG 12 (Guevara & Pla, 2019; United Nations, 2020a; Wang et al, 2019). SDG 12 is particularly relevant to sustainable development because, in addition to its environmental content (Szennay et al, 2019), it is also associated with social and economic factors (Fonseca & Carvalho, 2019; Lu et al, 2021) and is the goal with the most links to other goals and a key cross‐cutting enabler of Agenda 2030 (Bauer et al, 2018; Le Blanc, 2015). Indeed, dealing with sustainable production and consumption means that, on the one hand, production processes will need to dovetail with the functioning of socio‐ecological systems; and, on the other hand, consumers will have to be aware and well informed if they are to adopt sustainable purchasing decisions and behaviours (Guevara & Pla, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, dealing with sustainable production and consumption means that, on the one hand, production processes will need to dovetail with the functioning of socio‐ecological systems; and, on the other hand, consumers will have to be aware and well informed if they are to adopt sustainable purchasing decisions and behaviours (Guevara & Pla, 2019). Thus, advancement towards SCP patterns would enable progress in many other areas of the sustainable development agenda (Bauer et al, 2018; Bengtsson et al, 2018) as it demands societal transformation.…”