Background Information

About the Project

SWITCH-Asia, supported by European Union (EU), United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) are organizing a Dialogue on Sustainable Lifestyle for SCP (sustainable patterns of consumption and production) with an Additional Focus on Covid-19. This initiative aims to create an enabling environment (policies, financing, technologies, business models, and stakeholder engagement) to replicate and scale up good practices on sustainable lifestyles.

Objectives

To enhance understanding of sustainable lifestyle concept through discussion of good practices in Asia with relevant examples from European countries;

To analyze/propose the enabling environment (policies, financing, business models, technologies and stakeholders' engagement) and promote knowledge transfer through networking.

A “sustainable lifestyle” is a cluster of habits and patterns of behaviour embedded in a society and facilitated by institutions, norms and infrastructures that frame individual choice, in order to minimize the use of natural resources and generation of wastes, while supporting fairness and prosperity for all.* *This is an updated definition based on UNEP (2010), the Taskforce on Sustainable Lifestyles (Sweden, n.d.), and recent research as referenced in this publication.)

In 2020, the world was struck by a pandemic known as Covid-19. This pandemic not only forced us to change our lifestyle, the way we socialize, buy, share, educate, work and travel but it also gave us opportunity to see how our behaviour change can have real impact on the planet. For example, lockdowns and minimal activities has improved the air quality but dozens of surgical gloves, face masks and hand sanitiser bottles suddenly turn up in the Mediterranean Sea as ‘Covid waste’. .

Humans make hundreds of thousands of decisions during the course of their lives. Each and every one of us has an impact on the world. No matter how we choose to answer these questions, the lifestyles we end up living – or, in some cases, are forced to live – have a profound impact on our planet, affecting everything from how our economies grow to the health of our environment.* *A framework for shaping sustainable lifestyles (United Nations Environment Programme, 2016)

Dialogue on Sustainable Lifestyle for SCP with an Additional Focus on Covid-19 with 3 Live Webinars | 3 Topics | 3 Experts .