Collective Sustainability — How to tackle global issues locally?
By Reka Budai, On Purpose 2016 October Fellow, currently working in education and supporting social enterprises to get started with their impact measurement.
If you open up any news site nowadays, you will surely find at least one article about continental temperatures in Alaska, villages destroyed by unforeseen floods or polar bears wandering into urban areas — seriously concerning images, especially if we face them on a daily basis. We have never experienced such a state of emergency before — the UK being the first country to officially declare it. All of this is happening right here in front of our eyes, making it impossible to go about our lives as usual. Anyone with a mild social conscience, naturally feels compelled to do something, and we are bombarded with tips & tricks about lifestyle changes we can introduce to make our planet greener.
Who is going to fix this?
Most of these recommendations aim to change the quantity and/or the quality of our consumption, and they roughly fall into one or more of these three categories:
- not buying at all, and making the most of the resources already in use by participating in the sharing economy or buying second-hand durables, from all things clothes to furniture
- buying less and investing in multi-use products that reduce our waste, such as canvas shopping bags, reusable coffee cups and beeswax wraps
- making better choices that are less polluting and more natural, such as becoming vegan, biking more, flying less or using bamboo toothbrushes and home-made deodorants
Although we cannot deny each and every person’s contribution to these global issues, what’s always bothered me is what impact I can really make with these micro-actions?
As an example let’s take my below calculations on the potential impact of using a canvas bag vs a plastic one.
If I stop buying plastic bags for my weekly shopping that results in 52 fewer plastic bags in a year.
If every UK household did the same, it would contribute to 1,414 million fewer bags a year, which amounts to an impressive 7,072 tonnes of plastic (a bag weighs about 5 grams).
If every household in the world did the same this figure would be 414,000 tonnes.
Now let’s compare this to the yearly plastic production of one of the largest bottled beverage producer. On average they produce 200,000 bottles per minute, or 3,000,000 tonnes of plastic a year globally — 7 times what a global plastic bag swap would manage to reduce.
This is, of course, a theoretical exercise with assumptions and limitations. For example plastic bags are more widespread in some countries than others, and one bag is definitely a quantitative understatement for larger households. Still, I do think it is a really illustrative example to show that we cannot fully rely on individual efforts to solve global challenges.
The most important 17
This is not just about climate change or tackling plastic waste; there are several other global issues that need to be solved. Luckily, we do not need to figure out what these crucial issues areas the UN has already done this for us by identifying 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is impressive that all Member States collectively and unanimously agreed on these goals. Every country started assessing on which areas they need to move the needle to achieve meaningful change by 2030.
Acting collectively, shall we?
So here we are at one end with the choices we can make in our lifestyle, and the larger institutional initiatives and corporate action plans on the other. However, there is a layer in between, which is probably the most interesting for all of us. Is there something bigger we can achieve together as citizens rather than individuals to tackle these issues together? Some of the SDGs might seem to be insurmountable tasks, such as ‘Zero Hunger’ or ‘No Poverty’, however, we can all give some of our time to volunteer for organisations working towards these goals by signing petitions, donating to charities or going out on the streets to put pressure on decision-makers.
In this series of posts, I want to investigate what we can do locally for the SDGs through the power of collective action. For me, the focus is on London. Starting out on this idea made me realise that I do not know enough about the city I live in, and could not really argue for or against it with my friends who happen to live all around Europe, in cities like Zurich, Amsterdam or Helsinki. Is air pollution notoriously bad like you would imagine for a city of 8 million inhabitants? Although it has been officially classified as a national park, how green is London really? Should we bother planting more trees? Although the standards of living are some of the highest globally, how much is poverty an issue, especially when its global definition is living on less than a dollar a day?
So my plan for the upcoming months is to go on small missions, contributing to the work of organisations that are focusing their efforts on tackling one of the Sustainable Development Goals. The first adventure takes us to a really unexpected place in an unexpected location…
Take a look at the full series of collective actions here (new ones to come!):
SDG #3 Good health & wellbeing: Pigs in the middle of London
SDG #4 Quality education: Making friends with numbers
SDG #6 Clean water: Canoeing with a mission
SDG #11 Sustainable cities: Always room for more trees
SDG #17 Partnerships: What do you want to be when you grow up?
