Stockholm+50: Unlocking a Better Future

From urgency to agency

With Stockholm+50 we must move from acknowledging urgency to taking actions that enable a better future for all. 

The world has agreed on a vision for sustainable development and a common future – Agenda 2030 – which still needs to come to fruition. In 2022, we have the means to act and we are better equipped for change than ever. 

There is growing momentum for change. Public opinion reflects the urgency and indicates people’s willingness to change their lifestyles. Youth worldwide are both exercising and demanding more agency to fight climate change, environmental degradation and inequity. Key technological development and uptake has occurred faster than anticipated, and evidence continues to build of the many wins and co-benefits from taking climate and sustainability action at a policy level.

Now we need to address the speed with which we need to act, with stronger incentives for action than for setting new goals or making more commitments.

Decision makers at every level will need to compress timescales for decision-making in this decade to be transformative, without compromising values of democratic legitimacy and stakeholder consultation.  Simultaneously, time horizons must be extended to make bold long-term plans, avoid locking our societies into unsustainable infrastructure, accommodate time lags, and reduce intergenerational discrimination.

We can start to accelerate the pace of change, at both international and national levels, with discussions at Stockholm+50.

Keys to unlock a better future

Based on a synthesis of scientific evidence and ideas, this report calls for action under three broad shifts that would take us to a more sustainable development. The recommended actions proposed, if initiated now, can accelerate change, large and small, for the long term.

Redefine the relationship between humans and nature

The past 50 years – and even the past 5 years – have seen huge losses and degradation of nature globally. Humans have altered 75% of the planet’s land surface, impacted 66% of the ocean area, and destroyed (directly or indirectly) 85% of wetlands.

Many societies value nature as an instrument, something to be used just for resources; that perspective has driven the ecological decline of the past half-century and beyond. An instrumental valuation often underpins policies and economic structures that in turn shape behaviour and social norms at the individual level.

Redefining the relationship between people and nature will require redressing this imbalance. Deep changes across societies, economies and communities must be taken to achieve this shift: how we live in our cities, how we produce food, how and what we learn, and the knowledge and rights that inform our choices.

Actions include:

1. Integrate nature in cities and urban areas – Local governments can promote human-nature connectedness through green architecture, infrastructure and access to nature in the towns and cities where most people live and work, as a way of both seeding transformative change through shaping values and providing immediate climate, biodiversity and health benefits.
2. Protect animal welfare by including it in sustainable development governance – Animal welfare matters morally, and many of the ways in which we currently interact with animals also limit our ability to achieve sustainable development goals and have negative impact on the environment. Stronger protection of animal welfare will help build human-nature connectedness, and can also directly or indirectly benefit many other societal goals.
3. Expand and invest in nature-based education – Education policy and school curricula that connect children with nature can contribute to repairing our relationship in the long-term with nature, while preparing next generations to make sustainable decisions. Inspiration can be taken from Indigenous communities’ nature-based education.
4. Recognize Indigenous local knowledge and the Rights of Nature – Greater recognition of Indigenous local knowledge can make nature conservation more effective and support Indigenous rights. Assigning legal rights to nature can be a way of limiting extraction of resources – and can also lead to recognition of nature’s intrinsic values and change societal behaviour over time.

Ensure prosperity that lasts for all

The amount of natural resources extracted globally by humans each year has tripled since 1970. High-income countries have consumed most of these resources, with consumption footprints that are more than 13 times the level of low-income countries.

Ensuring lasting prosperity for all and bringing emission and resource footprints within ecological limits requires a complete rethink of our ways of living, and a shift in social norms and values that drive human behaviour. It requires redefining prosperity at all levels in society and economy.

Actions include:

1. Make a sustainable lifestyle the easy choice – Efficiency-oriented options and nudging measures for making lifestyles more sustainable are insufficient; systemic and transformative measures are needed. These should actively create enabling infrastructures, reconfigure systems and amplify social norms around ‘sufficiency’, as well as new global governance initiatives to address equity in these transitions.
2. Purchase function, not product – Households, businesses, and government agencies can switch from purchasing products to acquiring functions of products, cutting down the volume of materials we use and waste. Supportive regulatory frameworks and changed social norms on ownership and reuse could have a transformative effect on scaling such business models and reducing ‘material throughput’.
3. Make supply chains better for both humans and the environment and ensure that integrated supply chains bridge the technology and economic gap between developed and developing economies. Sustainable patterns of production should include prospects for new jobs and skills, scope for additional investment, higher interdependency in co-creating and sharing prosperity, social safety nets for the vulnerable, and environmental integrity.
4. Align national statistics with sustainability goals – Move beyond GDP by adopting indicators that help measure progress towards the vision of sustainable development, such as indicators on inclusive wealth and indicators recognizing the caring economy. Global governance and convergence on alternative metrics are needed to reduce the risk for first‑movers.
5. Change the selection environment for innovation – The upstream selection environment for innovation has a cumulative impact on technological development. Common sustainability standards and principles should be applied to guide innovation; international organizations can work to harmonize these and demand adherence for publicly funded innovation.

Invest in a better future

To ensure prosperity for all and redefining our relationship with nature, investing in a better future is necessary. Today, we have the paradoxical situation of a massive amount of capital ready for sustainability investments, yet persistent funding gaps in low-income countries. 

The funding gap for the SDGs globally has been estimated at USD 2.5 trillion by the OECD, while UNCTAD estimates that the value of sustainability-themed investment products in global capital markets increased by more than 80% from 2019 to 2020. Action is needed to not just mobilize capital for sustainability, but to ensure sufficient levels at lower costs, supporting allocation to places and sectors in need, and transitioning out of unsustainable practices and capital goods.

Actions include:

1. Recognize and enhance public funding of innovation and co-development of technology – Mission-driven public investment can contribute to sustainability-oriented innovation systems. These efforts are promising for both high-income and low-income countries. To bridge the technology gap between rich and poor countries we need a new paradigm of ‘co-development of technology’, particularly in critical areas of clean energy, health, and sustainable agriculture.
2. Incentivize active engagement in private finance – Investors should engage more actively to ensure sustainable finance becomes the norm. At a global scale, private investors are increasingly interested in monitoring the environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of their investments, but through shareholder initiatives or direct engagement with the firms in which they invest, they have much more power to transform sectors or industries.
3. Raise adequate private finance – We need to address scale, regulation, balance and risk for emerging markets to access investments for sustainable infrastructure. Creating multi-risk, multi-country hedging platforms can lower the cost of capital and bring more private and institutional investment into developing countries and emerging economies.
4. Reduce the perceived risk of sustainable investments and raise the perceived risk of unsustainable investments, for example through allocation mandates on lending portfolios. Many low-income countries cannot de-risk financially underserved sectors and technologies. To overcome this barrier, risks can be pooled across countries and then de-risked through a common fund.

Improving conditions for change

For the actions called for in this report and beyond to become reality, and for change to be transformative, the conditions for change must improve. 

Ample opportunities exist for leaders to tackle structural barriers that hold back effective action, by improving policy coherence and ensuring strong and consistent incentives for action; renewing multilateralism by rebuilding solidarity for the common challenges we face; and by creating a culture of accountable promises.

The institutions that were meant to solve the challenges of the past might very well have created some of the challenges of the present. Since 1972, our increasingly globalized world has shifted to governance shaped by a complex set of actors, working within a multitude of institutions at different levels, and with varying sources of agency.

The rules, norms and institutional structures we have now may or may not be ‘fit for purpose’ for the 21st century. They must ensure progress in human development for all, equity in access to resources, sustainability for nature now and for future generations, and justice for the most vulnerable.

The structural barriers of policy incoherence, weak multilateralism, and lack of accountability must be decisively tackled to enable effective action on redefining humans’ relationship with nature, ensuring lasting prosperity for all, and investing in a better future.

Opportunities include:

1. With more actors and stakeholders participating in global governance today, many more routes are available to take action. However, conflicts of interest and uneven power relationships must also be recognized.
2. Governments and international organizations must make their policy mixes coherent and consistent towards sustainability goals, in order to increase incentives for action, by adopting new practices and tools for more integrated and systemic policymaking.
3. The gap in trust and solidarity between countries acts as a barrier to new agreements, to raising ambition and to accelerated national implementation. Opportunities exist to renew multilateralism, to more effectively tackle environment and development crises, and to rebuild solidarity: developing multilateral responses to chronic risks, replacing technology transfer with a new paradigm of ‘co-development of technology’, and setting norms for the global financial system.
4. Countries, companies and citizens have to be held accountable for their actions and their inaction. We need new imaginative mechanisms for nurturing constructive accountability, which incentivizes and leads to bold action and change, rather than threatens and leads to pre-emptive action and reduced ambition.

Accelerating change

Half a century after the 1972 Stockholm Conference, which can be considered a global awakening to the entwined nature of human and environment development, this report synthesizes scientific evidence depicting how we have fared since. Given the world we live in today, the report provides guidance for how to unlock change for a better future.

The next decade will drive what happens to us and to the planet in the next 50 years and beyond. We must act now if we are to have any hope of reaching a sustainable existence in some of our lifetimes, in our children’s and our children’s children’s lifetimes. 

Setting small and large processes in motion today can allow us to progress on the principles that were established 50 years ago, at the first UN meeting to bring together humans and the environment, towards a better future. We repeat the same call made in the 1972 UN Stockholm Declaration for a new watershed moment in 2022:

A point has been reached in history when we must shape our actions throughout the world with a more prudent care for their environmental consequences. Through ignorance or indifference we can do massive and irreversible harm to the earthly environment on which our life and well-being depend. Conversely, through fuller knowledge and wiser action, we can achieve for ourselves and our posterity a better life in an environment more in keeping with human needs and hopes.

A youth vision

The report Charting a Youth Vision for a Just and Sustainable Future, written by young researchers from SEI and CEEW, presents a four-part future vision built on solidarity, living with nature, and equality, health and well-being for all.