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