Sustainability

This guide will help you navigate through the complex landscape of sustainability frameworks with a climate and energy focus. Despite the myriad of challenges of the last year including energy and cost of living crises, and geopolitical conflicts, momentum on climate-related sustainability continued in 2022. EcoAct’s annual research revealed that 70% of the largest listed companies are now committed to net-zero. The last year also saw many reminders of the urgency of the climate crisis, with scientists predicting that 2022 was the 8th consecutive year that global temperatures reached at least 1°C above pre-industrial levels. The impacts of this warming in the form of extreme weather events are all too clear..

Introduction   The Australian Government is committed to transforming Australia’s waste into a resource, where most goods and services can be continually used, reused, recycled, and reprocessed as part of a circular economy (refer to Figure 1). This requires changes to be made to all stages of the supply chain, from product design to disposal. However, without stable demand, there is little incentive for the investment in innovation or infrastructure needed to effect these changes. Sustainable procurement helps build a circular economy, aiming to reduce adverse social, environmental, and economic impacts of purchased goods and services throughout their life. This includes considerations such as waste disposal and the cost of operations and maintenance over the life of the goods and services. Australian Government officials need to consider these impacts when making procurement decisions in line with our obligation to spend public money efficiently, effectively, economically, and ethically. As a key principle of the National Waste Policy, the Australian Government has committed to considering environmental sustainability when purchasing goods and services. Under Target 4 of the National Waste Policy Action Plan, all levels of government and industry have committed to significantly increasing their use of recycled content. The Australian Government has committed to using its purchasing power to help build demand and markets for products containing recycled content. This can be achieved through embedding sustainability in contracts where there is an opportunity for recycled content (particularly glass, paper, tires, and plastics) to be procured. 

The concept of security is in our current societies increasingly connected with sustainability, which seeks to ensure that we as humans are able to live and prosper on this planet now and in the future. The concepts of energy security, food security, and water security—used separately or together—manifest the burgeoning linkages between security and sustainability. This book brings together ten scientific articles that look at different aspects of security, sustainability, and resilience with an emphasis on energy, food, and/or water in the context of Finland and Europe. Together, the articles portray a rich picture on the diverse linkages between both energy, food, and water, and between security and sustainability.