Conference Call

 

This inter- and transdisciplinary conference will provide a crucial opportunity to discuss recent advancements in sustainable consumption and production (SCP). It will provide a platform for building and enhancing connections between research, practice, and policy to increase understanding and action of how to move transformations to SCP forward.

Window of opportunity 

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.

Implementation and experimentation

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 modelling transformations toward just, equitable and sustainable systems of production and consumption.

Let's bridge the gap

This conference will provide a platform for exploring a wide range of practices, experiences, and policy initiatives in the context of cutting-edge interdisciplinary sustainable consumption and production research. We invite scholars and practitioners, such as business representatives, innovators, policymakers, activists, and members of communities engaged in sustainable consumption initiatives, to participate with concrete ideas, methods, and examples of how to inspire learning and change. We encourage discussion and reflection on the links and gaps between theory and practice. We seek to better connect research and action for sustainable consumption and production with strategies for transformative change.