Promoting SDG 12 on Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns – the Contribution of the European Union

Almost ten years after the adoption of the ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and a bit over five years before its end date, the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024 observes that “the world is severely off track to realize the 2030 Agenda”. For only 17% of the SDG’s 169 targets, “sufficient progress” is observed, whereas for the vast majority, progress is either moderate, but slow, marginal and very slow, stagnant, or there is even a regression.

One significant but arguably less debated Goal is SDG 12 “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns”. Also for this SDG, the Report is rather bleak: even if programmes on sustainable consumption and production have been adopted in many countries, targeting both the public and private sectors, overall “[p]atterns of unsustainable consumption and production persist” and “material consumption and material footprints continue to expand”.

On the one hand, the 2024 SDGs Report thus points to a certain ‘institutional effectiveness’, as the overarching aims of SDG 12 have been taken up ‘on paper’ in subordinate documents at various levels of governance. An emblematic example of how SDG 12 was further amplified rhetorically is its promotion in a March 2024 United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) resolution on “Promoting sustainable lifestyles”. UNEA stresses “the potential of behavioural changes towards sustainable lifestyles to contribute to the achievement of the three dimensions of sustainable development”, underscores that activities need to be undertaken via “action plans at national and regional levels”, and highlights the role of “adequate individual education and skills” in supporting more sustainable lifestyles. A progress report is scheduled for UNEA-7 in December 2025.

On the other hand, ‘on the ground’ – in terms of an ‘ecological effectiveness’ indicative of real improvements of the state of the environment (by alleviating consumption-related pressures on it) – things have largely remained unchanged.

‘Sustainable Consumption and Production’ in the Academic Debate: the Importance of ‘Sufficiency’

The importance of promoting sustainable consumption and production has been pointed out in the academic debate on sustainable development for a long time.

In this discussion, the notion of ‘sufficiency’, as a means of ‘enoughness’, has frequently been highlighted. Sufficiency is not only about ‘doing with less’ in relative terms, that is, consuming and producing more resource-efficiently by using less materials for the same gain (e.g. driving an electric instead of a fossil fuel-driven vehicle, also known as ‘substitution’). It is also about ‘doing/using less’, that is, curbing the use of material (e.g. energy, biomass) in absolute terms. Sufficiency-oriented policies thus complement efficiency-based measures promoting innovative technologies as “important tool[s] for dealing with the challenge of sustainable development ... , [as] sufficiency creates prosperity with less use of nature and materials”.

Scholars of sufficiency co-stress the environmental and social/developmental components of sustainable development, “curbing ecological crises and injustices” simultaneously, as sufficiency pays heed to ensuring the ‘upper limit’ (avoiding ‘too much’, often for the few) and the ‘lower limit’ (providing ‘just enough’ for everyone) of ‘enough’.

Sufficiency comes with several gradations: weak sufficiency results from individual-level lifestyle choices to consume less in absolute terms and/or to opt for products that are more resource-efficient (substitution); medium sufficiency requires institutional frameworks that nudge consumers towards less consumption and/or promote more resource-efficient production (e.g. by obliging companies to guarantee a ‘right to repair’); and strong sufficiency requires socio-cultural and macro-systemic changes – interrogating conventional ways of measuring economic growth and reconsidering cognitive frames on what it means to live adequately ‘with enough’.

Altogether, the academic discussion about sustainable consumption and production, framed within the broader debate about sufficiency, underscores the immense potential that having a “Strategy of the Enough” possesses for delivering on SDG 12 and, ultimately, facilitating the attainment of multiple other SDGs.

The European Union, Sufficiency-oriented Policies and SDG 12

As a self-declared global ‘green leader’, the European Union (EU) seems particularly well-placed to positively contribute to the attainment of Agenda 2030, including SDG 12. With its 2019-2024 flagship initiative, the European Green Deal (EGD), it turned “climate- and environmental challenges into this generation’s defining task”, making a discursive paradigm shift that prioritized environmental sustainability over the other two dimensions of sustainable development. The EGD mandated transformative policies across numerous sectors, from agriculture to energy and transport, both through domestic legal action and ‘green diplomacy’.

After five years of EGD implementation, how did the EU fare? To what extent did it contribute to ‘sufficiency’ and SDG 12? Recent research shows that, when it comes to sufficiency, the EU’s ambitious meta-discourse has not ‘trickled down’ to its derived strategies in key areas where one might expect sufficiency-oriented policies to play a role. These are typically sectors with a particularly high energy and material resource use (e.g. agriculture, energy, food, housing, transport) and policies oriented towards a general awareness-raising about consumption patterns. While the EU has introduced some novel metrics to better be able to monitor resource use and has adopted a few ‘green consumer policies’ (including the ‘right to repair’), the bulk of its initiatives across the sectors of the circular economy, food, energy, transport as well as in its stakeholder-oriented ‘Climate Pact’ comes at best down to ‘weak sufficiency’. The EU regularly calls on public authorities to provide informational tools aimed at enabling “citizens-as-consumers” to take rational decisions in favour of more sustainable lifestyles. Much action focuses in particular on ‘substitution’ rather than absolute consumption reduction. At the same time, the EU has so far not provided definitions of upper, let alone lower limits of ‘enough’. These insights confirm the patterns of earlier research on the EU Member States’ recent ‘National Energy and Climate Plans’, which had found that “sufficiency is seldom mentioned explicitly and rarely seen as a key field for policy action”. Altogether, such a ‘weak sufficiency’ focus implies limited EU institutional effectiveness, as even on paper, sufficiency and sustainable consumption play a comparatively minor role in EU policy-making – far inferior to the attention awarded to efficiency-oriented technological solutions under the guise of the EU’s long-standing ‘ecological modernization’ narrative.

This ‘weak sufficiency’ approach is unlikely to turn the EU into a relevant contributor to SDG 12. As Eurostat’s partially novel metrics on SDG 12 reveal, whereas on a few indicators (e.g. hazardous chemicals production and waste generation), minor reductions have been recorded in recent years, the “EU’s material footprint has been growing over the past decade” and its overall “consumption footprint considerably transgresses planetary boundaries”. By consequence, the EU is not ecologically effective at home – and can therefore at this point not legitimately claim any relevant global leadership on SDG 12.

The Way Forward for the EU: Acting at Home and Engaging the Global Community

Until 2030, what could the EU do differently to be able to show global green leadership in relation to SDG 12? The odds for strengthening its sufficiency-oriented policy agenda have not increased with the EU’s ‘competitiveness turn’ and focus on ‘economic security’ articulated in the European Council’s ‘Strategic Agenda’ and Commission President von der Leyen’s ‘Political Guidelines’ for the 2024-2029 period. This latter banks on “a wide range of innovative technologies” to achieve the EU’s decarbonization aims but pays limited attention to curbing resource use – a tendency also found back in the Commission’s February 2025 ‘Clean Industrial Deal’.

Nevertheless, to remain in sync with the Green Deal, the EU might wish to consider a triptych approach of ‘recognition-domestic action-outreach’ as an effective way forward:

1. Recognize the significant potential of sufficiency-oriented policies: curbing consumption represents a rather low-hanging fruit for policy-making, which “can be implemented far faster than new technologies can be developed” and thus ensure the EU’s ‘economic security’ in the shorter term. Using less resources reduces the need to import those, enhancing EU autonomy.
2. Act domestically: when reviving earlier EU-level debates about sufficiency, closely associating the Member States, emphasis should be placed on designing key consumption-curbing pilot policies. Such policies could usefully begin by defining upper and lower limits to consumption in select areas, starting from the building and transportation sectors.
3. Enter into dialogue: provided that it clearly commits to and adopts domestic policy strategies aimed at sufficiency, the EU would be in a solid position to reach out to other developed, but especially also developing countries, to discuss context-appropriate sufficiency pathways, drawing on best practices from all world regions. The ultimate aim of such dialogue and corresponding action is to put everyone on a path towards a convergence of lifestyles allowing to fulfil the EU’s “long-term objective to live well, within the planetary boundaries by 2050 at the latest” while moving closer to attaining SDG 12 in the process.