Day 2, Wrap Up Session

Feedback from Roundtables

1. Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP)

  • UN’s post 2015 and MDGs agenda should be explicit on SCP
  • there should be a strong link to poverty alleviation, equity, and wellbeing
  • employment included in SCP goals, especially of women and youth
  • governments to finance reform
  • trade practices transformed to better promote SCP
  • markets reformed to better integrate SCP
  • specific sectors: Sustainable Energy for All, but also food, transport, cities

2. Energy

  • distribution of power and obstacles to democracy are a key barrier to change, also, access to information crucial
  • new systems of participation in energy systems
  • accountability of public and private entities
  • redistribution and social justice: support local industries
  • match industrial policy to energy policy

3. Green Skills and Jobs

  • We need to ensure a positive integration of jobs and environment through a series of policies including bringing environment into poverty reduction strategies, shifting investments towards sustainability, developing alternative decent jobs and skills
  • Need to ensure democratic decisions on jobs and investments – communities must be given a voice and the capacity to have a voice
  • Bring in the voices of workers, farmers, informal economy, women as well as organizations, trade unions and NGOs
  • Ensure that Rio+20: – helps those vulnerable with social protection through social protection floors
  • commits to a Just Transition
  • concentrates in sectors with potential for decent jobs, poverty reduction and environmental protection
  • identifies a target on decent jobs that protect the environment to be attained in the next five years
  • identifies a better way to measure improved livelihoods
  • makes clear that the economic model needs to change if we are to achieve sustainable development

4. Finance/Banking/Indices

  • planetary boundaries: sufficiency and ecological footprints factored into the green economy and its finance/banking decisions
  • indices that measure transformation and review mechanisms
  • principle of subsidiarity
  • green economy not to be parallel, but to replace a dysfunctional system
  • Human Sustainable Development Index, but also economic disparities, equality/inequality should be incorporated to it

5. Food

  • trickle down won’t help us
  • more rights-based
  • precautionary principle
  • e.g. universities local food initiatives good, but there are also boundaries
  • in current system which hinder this
  • how to price food: emphasize the macroeconomic situation more
  • more local and regional production
  • local innovation and organic agriculture: help farmers to continue living
  • on land and rid themselves of debt, e.g. cooperatives
  • forced opening of trade is a problem

6. Cities

  • cities to become more holistic and food secure
  • nature to be seen as integral part of cities
  • cities to become innovation labs of sorts
  • link to rural strengthened and vice versa, link of global and local, better education

7. Water

  • rights-based approach, inalienable right to water, prioritize the most vulnerable
  • access to justice and a better general access framework
  • technologies that prioritize people and the environment, not just about cost efficiency
  • International Water Fund: to make capacities and programs more integrated, also a knowledge-sharing platform


 

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Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future, nef (the New Economics Foundation) and New Economics Institute are working in partnership to catalyse the Global Transition 2012 initiative.

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The first and second Global Transition Dialogues have been made possible by the generous support of the VELUX Foundations; and the broader initiative activities are made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation

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