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Co-Creating Sustainable Ways of Living 24 Stories of On-the-Ground Innovations

  • Published on November 30, 2021

The SLE Programme has supported 24 projects that are fostering the shift to more sustainable ways of living. Based on the unique contexts of local societies, the 24 projects identified the needs and opportunities for creating contexts where local people can live more sustainable and resilient lives, and carried out a diversity of actions toward achieving their goals. They faced many unforeseen situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic which made it difficult to fulfil some of the planned activities. However, these challenging situations enabled the project teams and partners, as well as the SLE Programme Coordination Desk, to revisit the meanings of their efforts to enable sustainable and reliable ways of living.

This report elaborates on the essential points of these projects, including the challenges of sustainable lifestyles, opportunities utilised, actions taken, learning, and other achievements.

Our lifestyles, through the impacts of our day-to-day activities such as eating, moving and commuting, heating and cooling our homes, taking work and care responsibilities, and so on, have become major threats to the sustainability of the environment. We are living beyond our ecological means and experiencing both very serious impacts on biodiversity, on a stable climate, on ecosystems, as well as facing difficult challenges related to vast social inequalities and reduced mental and physical health. While continued economic development and increased urbanisation in many countries are expected, it is imperative to consider how we could shift our current consumption-intensive ways of life into more responsible ones which produce fewer negative impacts. At the same time, people in many societies suffer from instability or insecurity in their ways of living, associated with rapid changes in environmental, economic and societal conditions. We need to continue our efforts to create a society where everyone can meet their needs in more resilient and reliable ways. Given these multidimensional challenges, we need to find and create pathways that enable diverse patterns of living which reduce negative impacts from our everyday lives on the environment and society, and realise more secure and stable means of meeting day-to-day needs.

In this context, the Sustainable Lifestyles and Education (SLE) Programme was launched in 2014 as one of the six programmes under the UN 10-Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns (10YFP, which is now known as the One-Planet Network). The SLE Programme has supported 24 projects that are fostering the shift to more sustainable ways of living. Based on the unique contexts of local societies, the 24 projects identified the needs and opportunities for creating contexts where local people can live more sustainable and resilient lives, and carried out a diversity of actions toward achieving their goals. They faced many unforeseen situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic which made it difficult to fulfil some of the planned activities. However, these challenging situations enabled the project teams and partners, as well as the SLE Programme Coordination Desk, to revisit the meanings of their efforts to enable sustainable and reliable ways of living.

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