Sustainable Consumption in the News

What is sustainable production?
iPoint

Industrial engineering and manufacturing of products is always accompanied by the extraction and consumption of raw materials from nature and the use of land. Furthermore, pollutants are emitted into the soil, air and water during the production process and along the entire supply chain.
The aim of sustainable production is to ensure that the production of goods conserves resources and preserves the regenerative capacity of the environment. Sustainable products secures the natural foundations of life for future generations. This requires a new approach to research, design and manufacturing.

Industrial engineering and manufacturing of products is always accompanied by the extraction and consumption of raw materials from nature and the use of land. Furthermore, pollutants are emitted into the soil, air and water during the production process and along the entire supply chain.
The aim of sustainable production is to ensure that the production of goods conserves resources and preserves the regenerative capacity of the environment. Sustainable products secures the natural foundations of life for future generations. This requires a new approach to research, design and manufacturing.

The Limits to Growth model: still prescient 50 years later

Transforming Education: Giving Children a Voice

Sustainable industries

Calls for Contributions and Submissions

Just, equitable, and sustainable human development in the 21st century requires transforming systems of consumption and production. The window of opportunity to avert irreversible damage to key earth systems, such as climate and biodiversity, is closing fast. Resource-intensive consumption and production are key drivers of unsustainable development and require radical restructuring to accelerate transformations towards sustainable futures. The most recent IPCC report (April 2022) makes history in, for the first time, stressing the need to focus on the role of consumption in climate change, highlighting “...the potential of demand-side strategies across all sectors to reduce emissions is 40-70% by 2050”. 

The timing of this call is auspicious. Once promising ideas, such as the sharing economy, transition towns, collaborative consumption, future visioning, or nudging, have not brought about change in consumption and production patterns at the scale and pace necessary. In response to the COVID pandemic, governments obtained an unprecedented mandate to establish ambitious recovery programs which could potentially lead to changing consumption patterns; however, it appears that responses have been largely aimed at economic rebounds and relative decoupling, while not initiating changes that can reduce demand and the dependency on fossil fuels. 

Transformative social change is more likely at a confluence of a political window of opportunity, public receptiveness to change, and policy and research ideas ready for implementation and experimentation. We may be facing this confluence now. On the political front, the IPCC report provides a new framing for political and policy debate, and for explicitly making sustainable consumption key to progress towards sustainable futures. The COVID pandemic has demonstrated that lifestyle changes are not beyond the realm of possibility. On the research front, a growing body of interdisciplinary work has uncovered how various aspects of the social and material world impede or enable lifestyle changes, with important insights for modeling transformations toward just, equitable and sustainable systems of production and consumption. 

Conference (sub)themes include, but are not limited to: 

• Sustainable consumption and lifestyles

  • Experiments, interventions, and case studies in sustainable lifestyles

  • Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic about lifestyle changes

  • Digitalization of work, consumption, and lifestyles

  • Social innovation and sustainable practices

  • Defining a fair living space: an international perspective 

• Sustainable production, sustainable business, innovation & design for sustainability 

  • Methods for sustainable production and industry research

  • Sustainable industry and eco-industrial parks

  • Sustainability assessment and indicators

  • Sustainable innovation, business models, and sustainable management

  • Design for sustainability and sustainable behavior

• Governance for sustainable consumption and production

  • The roles of local, regional, and (inter)national policy-making in transitioning to sustainable consumption and production systems

  • Policy in action: empirical case studies   

  • Interactions between science, society, and policy

  • Drivers of change toward sustainable lifestyle: from international to local to cross-cultural perspectives

  • Engaging middle actors in advancing system change: professionals, experts,  tradesmen, educators, business owners, etc. 

• Circular economy, circular society, and critical materials

  • Circular systems and circularity management

  • Circular business models

  • Circular design and circular products

  • Circular & closed-loop supply chains & value chains

  • Circular and sustainable procurement

  • From circular economy to circular society

  • Consumption in the circular society

  • Methods for circularity and circular economy

• Alternative, diverse, and plural economics for sustainability transitions

  • Feasibility, desirability, and likelihood of transitioning to 1.5-degree lifestyles and economy

  • Wellbeing and care-centered approaches as frameworks for social transformations

  • Lessons from experiments with alternatives to GDP

  • Advances in steady-state economy and degrowth: research and practice

  • Experiments with guaranteed basic income and guaranteed basic services

• Sustainable cities and regions and local action

  • Sustainable consumption and production in urban contexts

  • Urban design, buildings, and transportation for sustainable lifestyles

  • Making density attractive: theory and practice 

  • Sustainable consumption and production in rural areas and sustainable tourism

• Social movements, social learning, and social innovations

  • Discourses, dialogue, narratives, and social learning for strong sustainable consumption and production systems

  • Grassroots and social innovations for sustainable consumption and production

  • Societal impact of sustainable consumption and production research

• Sustainable food, agriculture, and agri-business

  • Agri-food system transitions and biodiversity-positive agri-business

  • Sustainable food security and valuing water 

  • Sustainable protein consumption and production (protein transition) and the shift to plant-based diets

Call for Participation

Researchers and practitioners from around the world are invited to submit session proposals and/or individual abstracts for presentation or posters. The submission system opens on August 30, 2022. Researchers and practitioners are welcome to propose full sessions and/or individual abstracts until November 28, 2022. Participation will be possible both in-person and online. During the submission process, individuals submitting proposals/abstracts will be asked to indicate whether they intend to participate on-site or online and which of the conference (sub)themes fits best for their submission (up to three themes can be selected). Session proposals/abstracts that are not aligned with any of the themed sessions are also welcome. All session proposals and individual abstracts will be reviewed by members of an International Review Committee listed on the conference website. 

• SESSION PROPOSALS can be for (i) academic sessions or (ii) dialogue-debate sessions. Proposals should be 300-500 words long and propose a coherent themed session lasting either 60 minutes or 90 minutes. Each proposal should speak to (a) what topic/question the session is focused on, (b) why it is relevant for SCP/the conference themes, and (c) what the specific perspectives are that the session is conveying. 

  • Academic sessions: Presentation and discussion of original research. A full line-up of individual speakers and discussant(s) should be included in the session proposal. Abstracts of academic research presentations lined up in this session do not need to be included in the session proposal but need to be submitted separately including the note that they are part of an academic research session and the name of the session proposal. Academic research sessions can be part of the special issue track (see below). Session organizers may choose whether or not they wish to organize their session as a full paper session (for which presenters submit a full paper prior to the conference) or a presentation-only session (for which presenters do not submit full papers in advance).  

  • Dialogue-debate sessions: Discussion and debate around a particular thematic focus, integrating research and practice. These sessions can take a variety of innovative formats as proposed by the session conveners. This includes creative/innovative/interactive sessions, world café-style dialogues, a series of short lightning / Pecha Kucha talks, work studios, etc.; In addition to the required elements of a session proposal (see a, b, and c above), the format/flow of the session should be clearly described. The conference organizers provide additional information/inspiration on possible formats on the conference website. 

• INDIVIDUAL PRESENTATIONS PROPOSALS  can be for (i) academic abstracts (ii) practitioner abstracts. They should be 300-500 words long, include a title, and list the names, institutional affiliations, city and country address, and emails of co-authors. Irrespective of the type of submission, author(s) are asked to indicate if the submission is part of a session proposal and if the submission is intended for oral presentation or as a poster presentation.

  • Academic abstracts should include information on the following aspects: (a) Problem statement, research questions/aim, theoretical approach, methods/inquiry approach, findings, conclusions, and practical and scientific implications. References can, but do not have to, be included. Submitters of academic research abstracts are asked whether or not they want their submission to be part of the special issue track (see below) 

  • Practitioner abstracts should describe the purpose of the project as related to sustainable consumption and lifestyles, and the problem it sought to address. It should describe the main features of the project, its strengths and limitations, the potential for scalability, and its contribution to understanding how to transition toward sustainable production-consumption systems.   

Special issue track: The conference organizers are planning to organize special issues in peer-reviewed academic journals. Individuals or session organizers interested in submitting their paper(s) to one of the special issues can indicate this during the submission process. It is intended to have dedicated full paper sessions at the conference where full conference papers will be circulated in advance and discussed to provide feedback to the authors that they can use to revise their conference paper for submission to the special issue. Participants interested in submitting a full paper to a special issue will be asked to submit their full conference paper until May 30, 2023, so that conference participants and session discussants have the opportunity to read the paper before the conference. Please note that this only applies to individuals or session organizers interested in submitting full paper(s) to the special issue track. For all other submissions, no full paper is required. 

All session proposals and individual abstracts will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee using the following criteria: 

• Originality/Novelty: contribution to existing knowledge or novelty of knowledge application/utilization

• Relevance/Focus: contribution to the conference theme and sustainable consumption and production research

• Quality/Comprehensibility: clarity of inquiry approach and findings/conclusions derived

• 'Safe and just operating spaces'
• Doughnut economics
• Sustainable consumption corridors
• Sustainable lifestyles
• Degrowth and economic reconfiguration
• Planetary boundaries
• Environmental economics
• Global carbon budget allocations
• Sustainable cities in the context of localized planetary boundaries
• Technological and behavioural change pathways
• Life cycle assessment/use of LCA studies in the context of sustainable consumption
• Rebound effects and/or systemic interconnectedness which could potentially hinder sustainable consumption
• System-level and individual lock-ins potentially hindering from reaching an environmentally sustainable society

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/bjm#author-guidelines


Guest Editors

Galina Biedenbach, Umeå University, Sweden, galina.biedenbach@umu.se
Johan Jansson, Umeå University, Sweden,  johan.jansson@umu.se
Virginija Poškutė, ISM University of Management and Economics, Lithuania, virpos@ism.lt

This Buildings & Cities special issue will explore social value in relation to both placemaking (urban design, architecture and real estate) and construction (procurement and labour) processes.

The emergence of the social value agenda has real potential for the promotion of justice, equality and social cohesion in our built environment. Social value is often defined in different ways by sector, industry and context. A useful working definition is “the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the relevant area” (Public Services (Social Value) Act, 2012). This demonstrates an interrelationship with triple bottom line sustainability, as well as the importance of prioritising impact within a defined spatial area, which could be local, regional, national or wider. Other definitions emphasise the importance of stakeholders and beneficiaries recognising and placing a value on the changes they experience in their lives, as well as the quantification and measurement of positive impacts.                         

The aim of this special issue is to explore current and potential approaches to defining, delivering, monitoring and evaluating social value in the built environment, its benefits and consequences and its relation to other existing policy mechanisms.  How can planners, clients, designers create and evaluate social value at different scales?  How can local stakeholders (communities) be involved and empowered? How can the intended outcomes be assured? Submissions are welcomed that examine these phenomena in the different social and economic contexts. Contributions that explore social value from various viewpoints and multiple perspectives are particularly welcome.

For the full submission details and further information, visit the Buildings & Cities Community Website: https://www.buildingsandcities.org/calls-for-papers/social-value-built-environment.html

Guest Editors

Flora Samuel, University of Reading
Kelly J., Watson, Hatch Urban Solutions

Call for inputs - Katowice Committee of Experts on the Impacts (KCI)

The Katowice Committee of Experts on the Impacts (KCI) is calling for inputs, guided by the questions contained in this questionnaire, from Parties and observers concerning Workplan activity 11, “Facilitate, exchange and share experience and best practices in the assessment of the environmental, social and economic co-benefits of climate change policies and actions informed by the best available science, including the use of existing tools and methodologies”.

Dr Renuka Thakore, Dr Jurgen van der Heijden and Dr Pallavi Saxena from the Future Earth, are collecting responses to input to submit to the KCI.

Please submit your responses by Friday, 19 September 2022.

Inputs will be considered by the KCI’s next meeting from 2-3 November 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Note: Environmental, social, and economic co-benefits may include, among others, positive impacts on pollution levels (i.e., soil, water, and air); biodiversity; equality levels between men and women; social inclusiveness; health; education; ethnic minorities and social groups; indigenous peoples; access to rights; national or regional GDP; employment; consumption; production; the income of workers (wages) and their families/households.

Experts, practitioners, and relevant organisations are requested to kindly limit their responses to the guiding questions in this survey. In addition, links to actual studies may be provided for more information.

Survey link: https://uclan.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/fe-call-for-your-inputs-to-kci

Upcoming Events

The European Network for the Fair Sharing of Working Time’s biannual conference will address the possibilities of a four-day week in Europe, and what real working time reduction could look like.

There will be three panel discussions. The first will look at best practice examples across Europe, with representatives sharing lessons learnt and practical strategies towards achieving working time reduction. The second will consider the ambiguities of a four-day week, understanding risks such as compressed hours and threats from objectors. The third panel will look at what actions trade unions are taking in the fight for working time reduction in Europe, with representatives from unions in France, Switzerland and Germany.

We hope that the conference will facilitate fruitful discussion and support strategy-building on the road to achieving working time reduction in Europe.

Download here the agenda. 

To register for the conference, please click here

There is a limited number of in-person spaces, so please indicate whether you intend to attend in person or virtually.
The event will be live-streamed via Zoom.
Please also note that the dinner on 20 October will not be covered by the organisers.
Deadline for registration is 18 October. For any questions related to the organisation of the conference, please contact India Burgess at india@autonomy.work 

Publications by Members