Empower consumers and youth with skills and sustainable lifestyles thinking with a focus on high impact sectors
Sustainable lifestyles and skills are essential levers for achieving environmental and social goals. They go beyond simply raising awareness—they cultivate the capacity for creativity and innovation, enabling individuals and communities to reimagine consumption patterns and influence market dynamics. When people are equipped with practical skills and sustainability-oriented mindsets, they become empowered to drive systemic change.
Informed and capable individuals are more likely to make choices that reduce waste and pollution, lower carbon emissions, and conserve limited natural resources. These choices—ranging from energy-efficient living to responsible purchasing—can collectively reshape demand and encourage the development of more sustainable products and services.
Policy interventions that support education, training, and skill-building for sustainable living are therefore critical. By fostering these capabilities, governments and stakeholders can accelerate the transition to low-carbon, resource-efficient societies and promote inclusive, long-term well-being.
Key areas of Intervention
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Embracing Sustainable Lifestyles
Sustainable Lifestyles are considered as ways of living, social behaviours and choices, that minimize environmental degradation (use of natural resources, CO2 emissions, waste and pollution) while supporting equitable socio-economic development and better quality of life for all. The programme will work with a broad range of stakeholders to help develop the evidence needed to rethink the way societies are organized, resourced and maintained, including through education in all its forms. The objective will be to inform and support the development of incentives, enabling infrastructures and solutions, considering social norms, economies, cultures and local contexts, and to empower people to live better and lighter.
Research: What are Sustainable Lifestyles?
- Enabling Sustainable Lifestyles in a Climate Emergency
- 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Towards a Fair Consumption Space for All
- Sustainable Living and Lifestyles: Covid-19 impacts
- Lifestyle Impact on Biodiversity and Nature
- A framework for shaping sustainable lifestyles: determinants and strategies
- 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Targets and options for reducing lifestyle carbon footprints
- Society and Lifestyles in 2050: Insights from a Global Survey of Experts
Tools and Resources
- Enabling Sustainable Lifestyles in a Climate Emergency.
- Fostering and Communicating Sustainable Lifestyles: Principles and Emerging Practices
- Sustainable Lifestyles: Options and Opportunities
- Sustainable Lifestyles: Options and Opportunities in the Workplace
- Sustainable Lifestyles University Network (SLUN)
Activating people for the SDGs
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Sustainable Tourism Programme
The One Planet Sustainable Tourism Programme sets the SCP agenda in the tourism sector to advance the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 12 and delivers progress under connected goals, such as SDG13, SDG14 and SDG15, respectively on climate action and the protection of marine and terrestrial ecosystems.
The Programme works with governments, tourism businesses, and civil society to accelerate change through voluntary commitments and multi-stakeholder action platforms. Among the programme’s priority stakeholders are Small Island Developing States (SIDS), where tourism plays a critical socio-economic role and whose economies are particularly exposed to the impacts of climate change and ocean degradation.
Key workstreams include:
- Global Tourism Plastics Initiative (GTPI)
Co-led by UNEP and UN Tourism in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the GTPI mobilizes the tourism sector to eliminate problematic plastics, scale reuse models, and increase recycling and recycled content. More information: Global Tourism Plastics Initiative
- Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism (GD)
Launched at UNFCCC COP26, this voluntary framework unites tourism stakeholders around a common commitment to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net zero before 2050. Signatories commit to measure, decarbonize, regenerate, collaborate, finance, and report progress. More information: Glasgow Declaration for Climate Action
- Global Roadmap for Food Waste Reduction in Tourism
Developed under the One Planet Sustainable Tourism Programme by UN Tourism in collaboration with UNEP, this roadmap guides the sector in addressing SDG 12.3 through food waste prevention, redistribution, and diversion strategies. More information: Sustainable Food Systems
- Regional Sustainable Tourism Standards
UNEP supports the development of regional sustainable tourism standards that integrate circular economy principles and align with local environmental and socio-economic priorities. Ongoing work in the East African Community and Central Asia is strengthening policy coherence and building capacity for practical implementation through trainings and technical assistance.
For more information, please visit: https://www.oneplanetnetwork.org/programmes/sustainable-tourism/about
- Global Tourism Plastics Initiative (GTPI)
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Green Jobs for Youth Pact
The Green Jobs for Youth Pact is a strategic interagency partnership between the ILO, UNEP, and UNICEF, designed to work both with and for youth by uniting governments, businesses, and educational institutions. Its mission is advanced through three core tracks: first, employment creation & entrepreneurship, which focuses on developing new decent green jobs, greening existing roles, and fostering green startups and young entrepreneurs Second, environmental education & skills development calls on governments and academic institutions to integrate sustainability into curricula and training programs, from universities to TVETs, and to provide essential green skills training. Finally, the pact emphasizes empowerment & youth engagement by supporting youth advocacy for green transition policies and offering mentorship, capacity building, bootcamps, and accelerator programs to bolster youth-led green businesses and promote vital green skills.
For more information, please visit: https://www.unep.org/topics/youth-education-and-environment/green-jobs-youth/about-green-jobs-youth-pact
