SDG 12: Responsible consumption and production

The production, and therefore the consumption of almost any good, depends on the use of the resources the planet has to offer.

What we already know is that we are using more resources than the planet can offer us, and we are using them in a discriminate and unsustainable way.

What does this mean? That we have paid a very high price for the economic and social progress we have experienced over the last few centuries, the planet's system for generating resources has been greatly degraded and if we continue in this way we will end up exhausting them and, furthermore, our planet, and therefore we, its inhabitants, our cities and societies, will suffer irreversible damage.

What has the pandemic meant in all this? Basically, it has given us the opportunity to rethink where we are and to visualise our future as a society. It has allowed us to develop recovery plans that reverse current trends and change our consumption and production patterns towards a more sustainable future. However, the transformation is slow, because it is structural. In many industries, responsible consumption of resources is something that is not contemplated at all and that incorporating it into their strategic plans requires very deep changes.

But it is also true that there are more and more companies caring about the planet and taking steps forward. More and more social entrepreneurs are coming up with revolutionary ideas with ripple effects that bring built-in improvements to the production and consumption patterns we use today.

According to Global Footprint Network, by 29 July 2021, humanity will have used up all the resources the Earth can generate in one year.

We need to slow down the pace, we need to connect more with nature, something which the pandemic has helped us to do, and we need to understand that the planet and its resources are not infinite and that our future depends directly on the future of the Earth.

At Stockholm+50, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stressed that the Earth's ecosystems cannot keep pace with our demands and that we are currently consuming at a rate of 1.7 planets a year, in fact he added that if global consumption were at the same level as the one of the world's richest countries we would need more than three planet Earths to live on and would therefore be facing a triple global crisis.

"A climate emergency that is killing and displacing more people every year. Ecosystem degradation that is increasing biodiversity loss and compromising the well-being of more than 3 billion people. And a rising tide of pollution and waste that is costing an estimated nine million lives a year," the Secretary-General said.

However, as he stressed, we have the values and tools to reverse this situation. According to the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the transition to sustainable consumption and production and the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation would address the main drivers of ecosystem disruption, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and climate change.

But not only that, meeting this SDG would mean coming closer to meeting many others such as SDG 1, no poverty, SDG 3, good health and well-being, SDG 6, clean water and sanitation, and SDG 8, decent work and economic growth.