The science is clear, as is the urgency to accelerate a structural transformation of the way we manage our natural resources, consume and produce. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is already beyond reach, unless immediate and deep emissions reductions happen across all sectors. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimates that the degradation of the Earth’s land surface through human activities is negatively impacting the well-being of at least 3.2 billion people, pushing the planet towards a sixth mass species extinction. Pollution and waste, including plastics, are increasingly degrading our environment, with worrying impacts on human health. Through strategic action, we must address the drivers of those crisis, as over 50 per cent of global GHG emissions and 90 per cent of global biodiversity and water stress impacts can be directly linked to the way we extract, use and dispose of natural resources in our consumption and production systems (International Resource Panel).

The trends in the way global societies produce and consume reflect an increasingly unequal and inequitable world. Developed and industrialized countries record the highest level of domestic material consumption per capita, while resource intensive production processes are being outsourced to developing and emerging economies, which are burdened with the attendant negative impacts of extraction and processing, without the benefits accrued by their use4. The inequalities and vulnerability attached to this unbalanced order have increased with the Covid-19 pandemic and global sustainability gains have derailed: for the first time in over 20 years, more people were pushed back into extreme poverty than those who were able to escape it.

There is a new global imperative for sustainable consumption and production to reset our global action towards 2030. The world needs an unprecedented collective effort to accelerate the shift to sustainable consumption and production, at all levels, as an essential condition for achieving the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and those contained in the Multilateral Environmental Agreements.

This first One Planet Network Forum took place prior to the Stockholm+50 as a way of providing a much-needed platform to advance commitments and as part of an ambitious multilateral effort to inspire a global movement for sustainable consumption and production, in close collaboration with key strategic partners, champions and ambassadors at global, regional and national level.