621.3 (new) Life Cycle: Furthering global action for sustainable consumption and production strategies through enhanced decision-making, knowledge and access to Life-Cycle Thinking The project aims to increase effectiveness, by public and private stakeholders including within UNEP, to catalyze sustainable consumption and production for a just transition through the application of life-cycle thinking. The project will contribute to bridge the gap between science, policy, and actions, making the application and adoption of life-cycle approaches more accessible and mainstreamed. Life-Cycle Thinking (LCT) contributes to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development faster and more efficiently by focusing decisions and policies on key drivers for change and identifying trade-offs between goals. With the agreement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a consensus emerged that current and future social, environmental, and economic challenges are interlinked and must be addressed through an integrated systems approach. Current approaches to Sustainable Consumption and Production are often sub-optimal because a holistic systems perspective is regularly lacking in decision making processes by governments, the private sector, and individuals. LCT provides this systems perspective and helps identifying priorities and opportunities to improve production and consumption systems, while avoiding unintended trade-offs in environmental, social, and economic impacts. However, lack of understanding between life cycle scientists and regulators and decision-makers on the one hand, as well as lack of capacity, know-how and harmonized life cycle knowledge on the other, hamper the uptake of life-cycle thinking in the relevant processes. UNEP has the necessary normative and convening power, neutral perspective, and global outreach to build consensus around life cycle knowledge and approaches. It also brings the credibility of a positive track record in developing capacity around the world, especially in emerging economies. Additionally, UNEP hosts a plethora of Initiatives, including the Life Cycle Initiative that help achieve its mandate faster by scaling up action of multiple stakeholders in short time frames. All these elements create a clear opportunity for UNEP to continue this work and embed it in the efforts towards transitioning to a systemic approach for sustainable consumption and production strategies. 

This project document will focus on crosscutting LCA methodology, tools and approaches. Sector specific LCA thinking, tools, and approaches will be developed in the relevant sectors’ project documents. Substantive intervention is targeted at continuing to strengthen the consensus building around accessibility and interoperability of life cycle methods and data as a foundation of life-cycle approaches. Using LCT to focus on key drivers for impacts (hotspots) and identify and help address potential trade-offs between goals and impact areas, ensures that policies and decisions achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) faster and more efficiently. The Life Cycle project is also extremely relevant and cross cutting to the UNEP Programme of Work (PoW), touching upon each of the three pillars, and having a direct contribution to outcomes 2A, 1B and 3B.The project is an instrumental component in the Sub-Programme on Finance and Economic Transitions and contributes to many of the SDG targets, it is most relevant to SDG 12 with Targets 12.2, 12.4, 12.4, 12.6,12.7 and 12.8 and is also relevant to various other SDGs. The relevance of this project is demonstrated with these links and detailed in this project document.