The twelfth global goal is to make production and consumption more sustainable and reduce the amount of material used and waste produced. While reaching this goal includes overcoming numerous challenges, the global community can still achieve its goal set out until 2030. This involves increasing recycling and reuse and paying more mind to the materials and products we use every day.
Video Transcript
In today’s society, production and consumption drives progress, and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12 aims to ensure that this production and consumption is sustainable so that our progress may be sustainable as well.
Much of SDG 12 will depend on structural changes, and so an important target will be for every UN country to write and implement a 10-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production, that is specific to each country’s capabilities.
Another very important step towards sustainable consumption and production is to achieve sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources, seriously reducing the material footprint per capita of developed nations.
By 2030, we should aim to dramatically reduce how much we waste, first by following the three Rs - reduce, reuse, and recycle - and by paying close attention to food waste. By 2030, we should have halved the amount of food wasted both at the retail level and the customer level, by encouraging more sustainable consumption and better supply chain management.
In another vein, SDG 12 wishes to raise awareness and normalise sustainable practices, both for companies, by encouraging them to adopt sustainability measures and include sustainability information in their reports, and for the general public by ensuring that the maximum number of people have access to the relevant information and awareness for “sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature.”
To reach these targets, the international community needs to support developing countries as they strengthen their own technological capacity moving towards more sustainable production. At the same time, the UN urges that fossil-fuel subsidies should be reevaluated, since in most cases, they encourage inefficient resource use and unnecessarily contribute even more to the harmful effects of fossil fuels.
In a slightly lighter area, SDG 12 also hopes to promote more sustainable and respectful tourism. Tourism is often a source of unsustainable practices and can be quite damaging to local culture and environment, so developing and using tools that monitor and manage the pernicious effects of tourism is also important to SDG 12.
More so than some of the other SDGs discussed in this series, progress towards SDG 12 is in particularly dire condition. Worldwide material consumption grows every year and in 2017 reached 92.1 billion tons, growing 250 percent since 1970. In comparison, the world population has only grown by a little over 100 percent since 1970.
With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the material footprint per capita has also grown to 12 tons of natural resources per capita in 2015 from 8 tons in 1990.
We have mentioned the need for better policy frameworks and more oversight, but only 71 countries and the European Union are seriously working on this front. Additionally, compliance and openness with international agreements on sustainability varies considerably year from year and nation to nation.
More work is definitely needed if we can even hope to meet that goals set out by SDG 12. And the longer we procrastinate, the more drastic measures taken will need to be.