scholarly journals Sustainable Consumption: Scope and Applicability of Principles of International Law

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Ipshita CHATURVEDI

Abstract The role of sustainable development has been increasingly recognized in international environmental law as a way to reconcile poverty eradication and resource exploitation with environmental protection. By contrast, little attention has been given to the concept of sustainable consumption. When international law mentions sustainable consumption, consumption and production are generally considered together, for instance in Goal 12 of the Sustainable Development Goals, addressing responsible consumption and production, and in UNEP’s 10-year sustainable ‘consumption and production programme.’ While some research on sustainable consumption has been conducted in sociology and anthropology, the focus in international environmental law has remained on production rather than consumption. This article seeks to open up a discussion on how consumption should be viewed and defined legally, and the role that law could play in promoting sustainable consumption.

2021 ◽  
pp. 183933492110526
Author(s):  
Al Rosenbloom

This article is a commentary on how marketing scholarship can be more relevant as it tackles the human development challenges presented by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The commentary argues that as businesses are transforming themselves into purpose-driven organizations, marketing needs to be a part of that transformation. SDG 1 No Poverty and SDG 12 Sustainable Consumption and Production are discussed within the article. The commentary also tackles the institutional barriers that work against path-breaking SDG marketing scholarship: normative promotion and publication expectations along with the practitioner-academic research divide. Without realigning the incentives that reward original, boundary-spanning SDG marketing scholarship, the marketing discipline will be stuck in a cycle of rewarding one behavior while hoping for another.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
pp. e1501499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Obersteiner ◽  
Brian Walsh ◽  
Stefan Frank ◽  
Petr Havlík ◽  
Matthew Cantele ◽  
...  

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for a comprehensive new approach to development rooted in planetary boundaries, equity, and inclusivity. The wide scope of the SDGs will necessitate unprecedented integration of siloed policy portfolios to work at international, regional, and national levels toward multiple goals and mitigate the conflicts that arise from competing resource demands. In this analysis, we adopt a comprehensive modeling approach to understand how coherent policy combinations can manage trade-offs among environmental conservation initiatives and food prices. Our scenario results indicate that SDG strategies constructed around Sustainable Consumption and Production policies can minimize problem-shifting, which has long placed global development and conservation agendas at odds. We conclude that Sustainable Consumption and Production policies (goal 12) are most effective at minimizing trade-offs and argue for their centrality to the formulation of coherent SDG strategies. We also find that alternative socioeconomic futures—mainly, population and economic growth pathways—generate smaller impacts on the eventual achievement of land resource–related SDGs than do resource-use and management policies. We expect that this and future systems analyses will allow policy-makers to negotiate trade-offs and exploit synergies as they assemble sustainable development strategies equal in scope to the ambition of the SDGs.


Author(s):  
Joyeeta Gupta ◽  
Üsame Ceylan

The growing body of international environmental law has not been successful in addressing the ecological challenges affecting our planet according to the Global Environment Outlook-6. We are not making enough progress to address environmental problems in such a manner that we can achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030 or achieve some degree of sustainable development by 2050. This chapter reviews the latest science on environmental issues and draws five lessons: First, incremental hard law is unable to pre-empt tomorrow’s problems, let alone address yesterday’s challenges. Second, international environmental law needs to make a quantum jump in terms of understanding of the issues and identification of appropriate tools—and this requires the legal community to engage more proactively with scholars from other disciplines. Third, international environmental law must address the drivers of environmental destruction. Fourth, it needs to engage more proactively with the growing pollution caused by the rich and the growing vulnerability of the poor to the impacts. Finally, principles of environmental justice may need to be incorporated in a possible Global Constitution if we are to live peacefully within a world of resource limits.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis J. Kotzé ◽  
Duncan French

In this article we argue that the Anthropocene’s deepening socio-ecological crisis amplifies demands on, and exposes the deficiencies of, our ailing regulatory institutions, including that of international environmental law (iel). Many of the perceived failures of iel have been attributed to the anthropocentric, as opposed to the ecocentric, ontology of this body of law. As a result of its anthropocentric orientation and the resultant deficiencies, iel is unable to halt the type of human behaviour that is causing the Anthropocene, while it exacerbates environmental destruction, gender and class inequalities, growing inter- and intra-species hierarchies, human rights abuses, and socio-economic and ecological injustices. These are the same types of concerns that the recently proclaimed Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs) set out to address. The sdgs are, however, themselves anthropocentric; an unfortunate situation which reinforces the anthropocentrism of iel and vice versa. Considering the anthropocentric genesis of iel and the broader sdgs framework, this article sets out to argue that the anthropocentrism inherent in the ontological orientation of iel and the sdgs risks exacerbating Anthropocene-like events, and a more ecocentric orientation for both is urgently required to enable a more ecocentric rule of law to better mediate the human-environment interface in the Anthropocene. Our point of departure is that respect for ecological limits is the only way in which humankind, acting as principal global agents of care, will be able to ensure a sustainable future for human and non-human constituents of the Earth community. Correspondingly, the rule of law must also come to reflect such imperatives.


Author(s):  
Riccardo Pavoni ◽  
Dario Piselli

This article explores the implications for international environmental law of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which occurred at the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit. Following a summary of the main outcomes of the Summit, the paper evaluates the process and vision of the SDGs against both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the past efforts of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in the field of sustainable development. The paper then examines how the environmental dimension of the SDGs is integrated into the general framework of the post-2015 development agenda and addresses two important questions which will most likely prove instrumental in the achievement of the Goals themselves. First, it the light of UN General Assembly Resolution 70/1, it discusses the normative value of the environmental obligations of States enshrined in the SDGs. Secondly, it deals with problems of implementation of the outcomes of the Summit, and accordingly attempts to identify the main legal challenges for the operationalization of the environmental component of the SDGs, in the wider context of the Agenda and taking the recent developments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) into account.


Author(s):  
Seda Yildirim

The term sustainable consumption is not only a behavior type in marketing and a just consumption behavior, it is more than this. Sustainable or responsible consumption behavior can change the world. Sustainable consumption concept has been investigated widely in the literature and factors that effecting sustainable consumption or being a green consumer has been investigated recently, too. But the relationship between sustainable development and consumer behavior isn't investigated sufficiently. After 2030 Sustainable Development Goals set up, responsibilities and roles have been an important issue to achieve sustainable development in the long term. In this point, this study aims to investigate the consumer role for sustainable development goals through sustainable consumption patterns and trends.


2022 ◽  
pp. 872-888
Author(s):  
Seda Yildirim

The term sustainable consumption is not only a behavior type in marketing and a just consumption behavior, it is more than this. Sustainable or responsible consumption behavior can change the world. Sustainable consumption concept has been investigated widely in the literature and factors that effecting sustainable consumption or being a green consumer has been investigated recently, too. But the relationship between sustainable development and consumer behavior isn't investigated sufficiently. After 2030 Sustainable Development Goals set up, responsibilities and roles have been an important issue to achieve sustainable development in the long term. In this point, this study aims to investigate the consumer role for sustainable development goals through sustainable consumption patterns and trends.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 2615
Author(s):  
Chiedza Zvirurami Tsvakirai ◽  
Teboho Jeremiah Mosikari

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have shone a spotlight on the importance of adaption to climate change. However, progress in achieving SDG 12 which calls for, “responsible consumption and production” has been stalled by the unavailability of indicators that adequately capture and motivate increased responsible consumption. To fill this gap, this article presents an alternative indicator that makes use of cultivar characteristics and uses South African fresh peach and nectarine exports as a focus area. Principal component analysis is used to extract and summarize the product value propositions identified in composite indices that were constructed by weighting the proportional use of cultivars in exports between 1956 and 2017. The indices acquired from the analysis were found to measure the provisions for sustainable consumption, good-quality fruit and off-peak fruit supply. The study’s results show that progress was found in the provisions for sustainable consumption and this was mainly driven by improvements in cultivars’ climate change adaptability. However, the last two decades have been characterized by years of successive lower readings on this index. Improvements in fruit quality index were found to be attained at the expense of farm enterprise productivity. The study concludes that strategies be developed to encourage the use of cultivars that promote responsible consumption as, if left uninfluenced, market forces will spur unsustainable production.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Robert Deuchars

<p>The term ‘fisheries management’ at first glance seems to be a reasonably unproblematic one. It implies that firstly, that there are resources called fish, and secondly, that these resources called fish can be harvested and managed. So far, so good. Next, there is the word ‘convention’. It is a commonly understood word in law in general and there are many conventions in International law and in International environmental law as well. Lastly there is the term ‘sustainable development’, a well-used term in International theory and practice, usually said to mean that although we understand the finite nature of the matter and energy that can be safely used by countries to develop, this can be tempered by putting in place measures and instruments to curb the excesses of human, and by that I mean industrialised, human activity on the environment.</p>


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