Planning for change: guidelines for national programmes on sustainable consumption and production

In the context of climate change, it has become clear that our global community urgently needs to adopt more sustainable life-styles to both reduce the use of natural resources and CO2 emissions. In accordance with the “Marrakech process”, these guidelines have been developed for governments and other stakeholders to establish national programmes on sustainable consumption and production (SCP).

Users are provided with an introduction to SCP and advice, comprised of ten steps, on how to plan, develop, implement and monitor a national SCP programme.

A cross-cutting step is incorporated aimed at linking the programme to existing strategies such as national development plans (e.g. poverty reduction strategy papers) and national sustainable development strategies. For monitoring purposes a special focus has been made on the development and application of indicators to measure progress toward SCP.

In addition, nine country case studies and other examples of good practice illustrating how governments are implementing SCP programmes around the world are provided highlighting lesson learned.