The Issue

In 2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Millennium Declaration, in which Member States committed themselves to fundamental values essential...

... to international relations in the twenty-first century. One of these is a respect for nature. The Member States asserted that “the current unsustainable patterns of production and consumption must be changed in the interest of our future welfare and that of our descendants.” These commitments were codified into Millennium Development Goal 7, which calls on the International community to ensure environmental sustainability and to reverse the loss of environmental resources. These concerns were reiterated at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) of 2002, whose Plan of Implementation states that fundamental changes in the way societies produce and consume are indispensable for achieving global sustainable development.

All countries should promote sustainable consumption and production patterns with programmes addressing the delinking of economic growth and environmental degradation through improved efficiency and sustainability in the use of resources and production processes, and reduction in resource degradation, pollution and waste.

UNIDO’s Strategic Long-term Vision Statement strongly reaffirms these calls by the United Nations General Assembly and WSSD. It states that in the long run the focus of UNIDO activities in the thematic programme “Environment and Energy” should be to bring about fundamental changes in both product design and technology, which provide for resource sustainability. As outlined in the Strategic Long-term Vision Statement, resource sustainability involves four steps:

  1. continuing to reduce the usage of materials and energy through cleaner production processes to enhance production efficiency and reduce effluents of hazardous and toxic chemicals;
  2. moving towards circular flows of materials by promoting more strongly their continued reuse and recycling;
  3. shifting from nonrenewable to renewable sources of energy;
  4. changing the emphasis from selling products to supplying services.