Sustainable consumption and production

Sustainable consumption and production (SCP) is at the core of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically addressed by SDG 12. This goal aims to "ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns," acting as a cross-cutting theme that feeds into other SDGs such as those related to climate change, poverty, health, and sustainable cities.

SCP involves using services and products in a way that minimizes environmental damage, preserves natural resources, and promotes social equity. The purpose is to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, which means pursuing economic development in a way that can be sustained by the planet over the long term. SCP requires changes at all levels of society, from individuals to businesses to governments.

At the individual level, SCP implies making lifestyle choices that reduce environmental impact. This might include reducing, reusing, and recycling waste, choosing products with less packaging, and opting for more sustainable forms of transport like cycling or public transport.

For businesses, SCP entails adopting sustainable business models and practices. This could include improving resource efficiency, investing in renewable energy, designing products that are durable and recyclable, and ensuring fair labor practices.

At the government level, SCP involves implementing policies that support sustainable business practices and incentivize sustainable consumer behavior. This might involve regulations to reduce pollution, subsidies for renewable energy, and campaigns to raise awareness about sustainable consumption.

SCP also plays a role in several other SDGs. For example, sustainable production practices can help mitigate climate change (SDG 13) by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, by reducing the pressure on natural resources, SCP supports the goals related to life below water (SDG 14) and life on land (SDG 15).

While progress has been made in certain areas, challenges remain in achieving the shift towards SCP. These include existing patterns of overconsumption, limited awareness about the impacts of consumption, and the need for technological innovation to enable more sustainable production.

Elsevier, Sustainable Materials and Technologies, Volume 12, 1 July 2017
Material and product life cycles are based on complex value chains of technology-specific elements. Resource strategy aspects of essential and strategic raw materials have a direct impact on applications of new functionalized materials or the development of novel products. Thus, an urgent challenge of modern materials science is to obtain information about the supply risk and environmental aspects of resource utilization, especially at an early stage of basic research.
Elsevier,

Encyclopedia of Sustainable Technologies, Volume , 4 July 2017

This book chapter advances SDG 15 and 11 introducing a novel agricultural practice—vertical farming/urban agriculture, highlighting how it can help deliver safe and nutritious food for a growing world population in environmentally and socially sustainable ways.
Elsevier,

Gopalakrishnan, Varsha and Bakshi, Bhavik R., "Including Nature in Engineering Decisions for Sustainability", Editor(s): Martin A. Abraham, Encyclopedia of Sustainable Technologies, Elsevier (2017), Pages 107-116

Through the practice of biomimicry, engineering can both emulate and conserve the natural world. In this chapter, the author notes that our development practices have often "ignored or undervalued" nature, and describes the ways in which we can aim to build systems that are self-sustaining and resilient, much like earth's ecosystems. This chapter advances SDGs 7, 11 and 13.
Approaches to food security primarily focus on technological solutions, seeking to produce more food, preferably with fewer resources. It has been argued that access to food involves issues of resource distribution and social marginalization. Governance is seen as one of the keys to redressing the institutional inequity that affects resource distribution. Rural women's empowerment is seen as a means to reduce social marginalization and to hasten progress towards hunger eradication and gender equitable institutions.
Proagrica data landscape infographic
Proagrica has produced a White Paper report which sets out how its technology supports evidence-based production and the impact that will have on the world’s ability to feed the world sustainably. Driven by the power of big data to drive insights at farm level, solutions such as Proagrica will significantly advance SDG 2.4 to ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production.
Many countries are experiencing economic benefit from a surge in tourism, but once pristine landscapes are changing and local communities rarely benefit from the tourism, and instead run the risk of losing their livelihoods. Researchers in Thailand are investigating “creative tourism” – creative, sustainable approaches to tourism, that enable producers and consumers to relate and get value from their connections. This supports the tourism elements of SDGs 8, 12 and 14.
John Dale left and Derek Burgoyne
Finishing 3,000 dairy-bred beef cattle on waste food while producing green energy and fertiliser as by-products is the sustainable model for one Cambridgeshire farmer and his business partner. This approach helps meet the criteria for SDG 7 of access for all to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy and SDG 12 which promotes responsible consumption and production.
It is no secret to anyone living in Beirut or a similar modern city in a semi-arid tropical country in the summer that their home has become a concrete forest and an urban heat island. Old wood or stone houses and their gardens have been replaced by concrete towers and parking lots, in the name of development. The result is searing summer nights, a drastic loss of insect and avian biodiversity, and a large increase in energy usage for interior climate control. These problems are experienced in rapidly developing urban centers worldwide.
Marine plastic pollution has been a growing concern for decades. Single-use plastics (plastic bags and microbeads) are a significant source of this pollution. Although research outlining environmental, social, and economic impacts of marine plastic pollution is growing, few studies have examined policy and legislative tools to reduce plastic pollution, particularly single-use plastics (plastic bags and microbeads). This paper reviews current international market-based strategies and policies to reduce plastic bags and microbeads.

Land Degradation (LD) in socio-environmental systems negatively impacts sustainable development paths. This study proposes a framework to LD evaluation based on indicators of diversification in the spatial distribution of sensitive land. We hypothesize that conditions for spatial heterogeneity in a composite index of land sensitivity are more frequently associated to areas prone to LD than spatial homogeneity. Spatial heterogeneity is supposed to be associated with degraded areas that act as hotspots for future degradation processes.

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