One Earth

The North American Actor and Activity Map on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), a project funded by Industry Canada, is a report that examines the concept of sustainable consumption and production, and explores the ‘communities of practice’ in North America that are acting on specific leverage points within and across the SCP system.  It builds on prior efforts, and contributes to filling a recognized gap in identifying who is doing what, where and why,  in Canada and the United States as well as across both countries. Each circle in the graphic represents the many people working in the variety of communities of practice along the path of the consumption and production system. A whole network of actors has built around SCP, whether this work is undertaken by government and its agencies, the business sector and industry associations, not‐for‐profit organizations and grassroots community groups – individually or through various forms of collaboration. They work on, for example, redefining progress and the measure of true wealth and prosperity, local self‐reliance, socially responsible investment, green public procurement, industrial ecology, life‐cycle analysis, extended producer responsibility, corporate social responsibility, cradle‐to‐cradle design, ecolabelling, sustainable consumption research, sustainable lifestyles and zero waste. The report gives more detail on the work being done across the system. Having a model of the system is a good starting point to discuss the interrelationships, for example between consumption and needs / values. Email emmanuel at oneearthweb (dot) org for more information. With thanks to Lisa Hemmingway (Backyard Creatives) for her design work on this project. The report can be found here as a PDF.

One Earth Initiative designed and delivered the 2nd North American Sustainable Consumption Workshop from 31 January – 1 February 2011 in Ottawa. The goal was a multi-stakeholder dialogue promoting bi-national collaboration on green building, as an important application of international sustainable consumption and production efforts. This dynamic and action-oriented meeting was hosted by the Governments of Canada and the United States as well as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The workshop involved more than 80 experts in green building and sustainability from Canadian and U.S. government, industry and non-government organizations, as well as United Nations representatives. The agenda can be viewed here. Speaker presentations can be downloaded. You can also view photos from the workshop here. One Earth wrote three of the four background papers: #1: “Sustainable Consumption and Production” (PDF 888 kb); #2: “Green Building Key Topics” (PDF 184 kb); #3: “Existing Canada – U.S. Collaboration on Green Building” (PDF 324 kb). UNEP produced the fourth paper on International Processes on SCP (PDF 123 kb). A summary report is forthcoming.