Anatomy of Action: a toolkit for activating people for sustainable living

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) “Sustainable lifestyles are considered as ways of living, social and behavioral choices, that minimize environmental degradation while supporting equitable socio-economic development and better quality of life for all.”

Image

Launched through a 15 days pilot social media challenge in September 2019, and feeding into the #ActNow campaign that supported the Climate Action Summit in New York, the Anatomy of Action structure transforms the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into low effort and high impact individual actions that enable people to live better and lighter. The Challenge was used to illustrate that in just 15 days, social media efforts could touch more than 5 million people all over the World. Early December 2019, Ms Garrette Clark, Sustainable Lifestyles Programme Officer at UNEPs Consumption and Production Unit, came to Brussels to explain how the Anatomy of Action can help promote change – for everyone everywhere.

Image

 “Not even those who are more sensitive about environmental issues wake up every day and prioritize how to save energy or reduce the amount of resources – we all wake up and live our lives and care about food, move, stuff, fun and money.  So how can we help people to live more sustainably?” Ms Clark spoke to an audience from civil society, consumer organizations and UN officials. The challenge we face, she explained, is to simplify and translate the evidence we have and translate it into concrete individual actions that are the most impactful. Given global challenges we need targeted, impactful efforts and not action for action’s sake.

” As individuals, we have an important role to play through everyday decision-making: how we choose to live, work and play as global consumers – how we run our homes, what food we eat, how we get around, how we relax, what we buy and how we care for our planet.” Ms Clark pointed out ”Therefore UNEP in partnership with the UnSchool developed this practical toolkit that can be used to help people make more daily sustainable choices”.

Working with global experts from UNEP, Programmes of the One Planet Network, and cultural influencers, such as UNEP’s Champion of the Earth Leyla Acaroglu, the approach created the visual of a hand  - to take action within the 5 lifestyle areas or ‘fingers’ of food, stuff, move, money and fun. Each category has three concrete actions with additional suggestions that can help people reduce their environmental impacts. Under STUFF, for example, the suggestions are Beyond Buying, Fashion slow down and Ditch Disposables.

Ms Clark noted that sustainable living is not only up to people. In general, people make decisions based on price, availability, attractiveness and other factors such as wellbeing or status which could cover sustainability. Yet even those people who would like to live more sustainability often lack available, affordable, desireable options. This is where governments and business can make more sustainable options the norm (or default!). 

In her final remarks at the brown bag lunch event, Ms Clark highlighted the need to go beyond finetuning our lifestyles – we need disruptive and systematic changes. She noted that we are in a sense used to such changes – as it is only relatively recent that sharing economy models for mobility and travel were introduced. The challenge is to find the new models that meet our needs and let us live our aspirations that improve everybody’s quality of life that are less impactful.

#AnatomyofAction is a contribution to the One Planet Network’s Sustainable Lifestyles Programme and is an actionoritented social media kit developed by the UN Environment Programme and The UnSchool of Disruptive Design to support individuals to take action on climate and advance the Sustainable Development Goals.

Find out more here: https://www.anatomyofaction.org/

SDG 12

SDG 4