Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production
Developing countries bear a large part of the climate, biodiversity and pollution impacts of resource-intensive production processes, without reaping their benefits. This situation has been made worse by the impacts of the pandemic. As part of sustainable global pandemic recovery strategies, the implementation of sustainable consumption and production will maximize the socioeconomic benefits of resource use while minimizing the impacts.
In 2021, 83 policy instruments supporting the shift to sustainable consumption and production were reported by 26 countries, bringing the total number of policies developed, adopted and/or implemented up to 438 (as reported by 59 countries and the European Union for 2019–2021). However, the distribution of reported sustainable consumption and production policies has so far been uneven, with 79 per cent of policies reported by high-income and upper middle income countries, 0.5 per cent by low-income countries and only 7.7 per cent by least developed countries, landlocked developing countries and small island developing States.
The global material footprint continues to grow, although the pace has slowed. The average annual growth rate of the global material footprint for 2015–2019 was 1.1 per cent, compared with 2.8 per cent for 2000–2014, indicating a slowdown in the growth of economic pressure on the environment.
The proportion of food lost globally after harvest on farm, transport, storage, wholesale and processing levels is estimated at 13.3 per cent in 2020, with no visible trend since 2016, suggesting that structural patterns of food losses have not changed. At the regional level, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of losses at 21.4 per cent, with food being lost in large quantities between the farm and retail levels.
In addition to food loss, it is estimated that 931 million tons of food, or 17 per cent of total food available to consumers in 2019, was wasted at the household, food service and retail levels. Subsequent evidence suggests that household food waste declined during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns but has since returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Source: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal12