Making the link
Sustainable Consumption and Production perspective links to most of the challenges that affect our world and lives today.
Climate Change is a good example. The concept of SCP offers a new, different and wider perspective on climate change. The SCP perspective has advantages over other conventional perspectives on global warming, which often only present snapshots that vastly oversimplify the situation.
The important feature of the SCP perspective is the integration of Sustainable Production (SP) concerning the supply side, and Sustainable Consumption (SC) referring to the demand side of human economic activities. The SCP perspective shows that the production related emissions are connected to a variety of consumption related activities. Consumption of products and services are also drivers of climate change. For example, road transport and air travel are a growing source of CO2 emissions. The rising global demand for timber and paper products has resulted in unsustainable logging practices destroying rain-forests which are highly important for a healthy atmospheric system.
Life-cycle thinking view would suggest that energy consumption is not only about our use of oil and electricity, it is also about the energy bound in all the raw materials consumed, the energy used to process these, and the energy used to dispose the waste after our products have served their purpose. Therefore, energy efficiency it is not only about making our cars run longer on the litre and the light bulbs consumer less electricity, it is also about saving the resources used to produce the car and the light bulb, the energy needed to dismantle them again, reuse the recyclable materials, and dispose the final waste.
Booklet Series
The booklet series will provide background on the links between SCP practices and today's environmental and socio-economic challenges such as climate change, poverty, water security, and biodiversity.
The following booklets available: