Without receiving enough benefits, developing countries bear a huge portion of the climate, biodiversity, and pollution effects of resource-intensive production systems. The pandemic’s effects have worsened the situation. 

The Sustainable Development Goal 12 aims to address this situation and ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

According to the United Nations, sustainable consumption and production will maximize the socio-economic benefits of resource use while reducing the downsides as part of long-term global pandemic recovery measures.

As part of our commitment to encouraging open dialogue about the Sustainable Development Goals and fostering knowledge sharing, we will continue our #ExploreSDGs series today by discovering content relating to SDG12 on our network.

Join the #ExploreSDGs campaign!

Cutting-edge research on Fair Trade

Under the Fairtrade label, producers, consumers, and advocates worldwide are working together to push for social and climate justice, while promoting responsible consumption and production.

The Journal of Fair Trade is an independent, peer-reviewed academic journal created in February 2019 by the Fair Trade Society and published by Pluto Journals. The Journal of Fair Trade aims to rediscover the best practices and ideals that contribute to mutuality and fairness in trade, while aspiring to be a source of cutting-edge research on Fair Trade.

The Journal provides a much-needed independent space in which to discuss the ever-changing practical and theoretical approaches to making the world a more just place through business and trade.

Highlighted articles:

• Challenges of COVID-19 for Fair Trade enterprises in attaining Sustainable Development Goals 2030
• Recentring Fair Trade in the movement for a just, inclusive and regenerative economy
• An empirical study identifying Fair Trade consumer attributes of compassion and sustainability awareness
• The Fair Trade consumer as a citizen-consumer: civic virtue or alternative hedonism?
• How impactful is Fair Trade? A paradigm shift in reporting would tell a better story

Achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources

Impact is a series of leading, high-quality science reports that truly enables the communication of research impact in a format and language that these stakeholders will understand. The journal features content from the world’s leading research agencies, policy groups, universities, and research projects.

In topics related to sustainable management and use of resources, Impact provides examples of good practices from around the world and innovative research in these areas:

• PIGSustain: Predicting the Impacts of Intensification and Future Changes on UK Pig Industry Resilience – Global Food Security programme
• Designing biofertilizers by mimicking plants’ recruitment of rhizospheric partners
• Optimising fertility in British broiler breeder flocks – BBSRC
• Research work undertaken in the Matsumura Group – Functional Polymeric Biomaterials for Controlling the Functions of Living Systems
• Cascading Adaptation of Rural Livelihood to Changing Environment in the Koshi River Basin

Indigenous Knowledge covers research areas related to indigenous knowledge, and plenty of the publications in this collection feature topics on sustainable use of natural resources and efficient management.

• Climate change and COVID-19: reinforcing Indigenous food systems
• Autonomous adaptation to climate-driven change in marine biodiversity in a global marine hotspot
• Navigating Multiple Tensions for Engaged Praxis in a Complex Social-Ecological System
• Indigenous Principles of Wild Harvest and Management: An Ojibway Community as a Case Study

Sustainable resource management helps to maintain and enrich biodiversity, and the Pensoft Biodiversity collection on ScienceOpen is a fantastic source of knowledge where scholarship on resource management, sustainability, and biodiversity protection intersects.

• The Wild Rivers Program: Development of a “Wild Rivers” Conservation Label to be used by River Management
• Seeking consensus in German forest conservation: An analysis of contemporary concepts
• The Shenzhen Declaration on Plant Sciences – Uniting plant sciences and society to build a green, sustainable Earth
• African Biodiversity Challenge: Integrating Freshwater Biodiversity Information to Guide Informed Decision-Making in Rwanda

Reduce waste generation and achieve sound management of chemicals and wastes throughout their life cycle

Featured in a couple of previous blogs related to other SDGs, the Journal of Green Building continues to be a great source for scholarship on topics of sustainability, green urban planning, responsible management of development projects, and so on.

Below we are highlighting only some of the articles related to the topic of reducing waste generation and responsible production in the context of urban planning, architecture, and building:

• Optimization of Electric Hot Water Recirculation Systems for Comfort, Energy and Public Health
• Bioactive Devices as Self-Sufficient Systems for Energy Production in Architecture
• Towards a Sustainable City Centre: Integrating Ecologically Sustainable Development (Esd) Principles into Urban Renewal
• Taking Construction Site Waste Management to the next level
• Major Factors Impeding the Implementation of Waste Management in Australian Construction Projects

Emerald: Responsible Management is a collection published by Emerald Publishers that encourages leadership that promotes non-discriminatory work and activities that do not create unnecessary harm to global economies, people, or resources.

The collection features Emerald’s best research supporting SDGs 8,9,10,11 and 12.

On topics of responsible consumption and production, you can find different articles, among which:

• Digital platforms: mapping the territory of new technologies to fight food waste
• Blinds up or down?: The influence of transparency, future orientation, and CSR on sustainable and responsible behavior
• Applying fuzzy interpretive structural modeling to evaluate responsible consumption and production under uncertainty
• Assessment of household food waste in Hungary
• Food security across the enterprise: a puzzle, problem or mess for a circular economy?

UCL-affiliated research on SDG12

UCL has collected all its published research supporting the United Nations SDG12 in a dedicated topical collection on ScienceOpen. Discover the wide range of topics related to SDG12 featured in this collection and spread the word on the importance of responsible consumption and production for a more sustainable future:

• The improved energy efficiency of applied smouldering systems with increasing scale
• Effect of recycled tyre polymer fibre on engineering properties of sustainable strain hardening geopolymer composites
• Encapsulation of cesium with a solid waste-derived sulfoaluminate matrix: A circular economy approach of treating nuclear wastes with solid wastes
• Mesoscale productivity fronts and local fishing opportunities in the European Seas
• Sustainability and ecological efficiency of low-carbon power system: A concentrating solar power plant in China

Join the conversation!

With our #ExploreSDGs campaign, we will be promoting collections that we find relevant to the SDG of the week on a regular basis. Join our Twitter campaign and share your own ScienceOpen research using the hashtags #ExploreSDGs and #ScienceOpen.