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Whole-Systems Framework for Sustainable Consumption and Production

1 A Framework for the Implementation of Sustainable Consumption and Production

1.1 The Call for a Framework of Programs

The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development’s Plan of Implementation recorded its delegates’ recommended actions for achieving global sustainable development. Chapter three of the Plan calls for a shift away from patterns of unsustainable consumption and production and for the creation of a ten-year framework of programs to bring the requested actions into fruition.

The UN, individual governments, and the private sector have environmental initiatives of almost every imaginable type and form: educational, technological, monitoring, financial, development-based, production-focused and more. Yet the World Summit on Sustainable Development¹ and the UNEP DTIE Global Status 2002: Sustainable Consumption² concur: the combined effect of these programs has fallen short of achieving our goal of global sustainability.

1.2 The Call for Better Models

New models and methodologies that integrate sustainable consumption and production are key to successful sustainability efforts. The "Way Forward" section of UNEP’s Global Status 2002: Cleaner Production prioritizes the integration of cleaner production and sustainable consumption efforts in its list of "elements to facilitate greater implementation of Cleaner Production."³ The report lists three necessary steps to achieving this integration, notably, "the development of methodologies which help in simultaneously addressing the issues related to Cleaner Production and Sustainable Consumption." ⁴

The corollary UNEP report, Global Status 2002: Sustainable Consumption, elaborates. The report identifies modeling as one of six strategic areas that need development in future sustainable consumption efforts. Strategic Area Three calls for:

Finding a more appropriate conceptual schema for describing the essential elements of systems of production and consumption, allowing for more complexity of elements and interactions than the two-sided ‘consumption’ and ‘production’, but still simple enough to assist analysis and intervention.⁵

This paper proposes a whole-systems model that expands on conventional consumption-production models by describing the linked cycles of unsustainable investment, production, consumption, and waste. Whole-systems models are more complete and are therefore better situated to identify coordinated networks of strategic interventions in an effort to move beyond interventions that only affect one part of a system. This paper will then recommend programmatic responses based on the work the Rocky Mountain Institute has developed in the areas of whole-systems thinking, Natural Capitalism, manufacturing efficiency, and alternative energy and energy systems. Our programs are organized into three groups: Systems Thinking, Green Design, and Regional Development.