English - Regional Activity Centre for Cleaner Production

14 | III. REPORT ON ACTIVITIES 2009 ANNUAL REPORT CP/RAC 2009potential for exceptional action in all areas: to carryout actions with a more global impact with aview to improve our behaviour towards our physicaland social surroundings.In this context, over the last few years societieshave increased their perception of the inseparablerelationship that exists between production andconsumption. This is due, to a large extent, to theever more important role that unsustainable consumptionhas had as a motor for impacts at environmental,economic and social levels: impacts thatare not caused directly by production per se, but byregularly increasing consumption, with which anincreasing amount of energy and resources isdirectly associated.Consequently, more and more public policies arebeing carried out which integrate both sides of thesame coin, consumption and production, whichcan now no longer possibly be seen as manageableseparately. An indication of this increasingperception is the number of national strategiesthat many countries have recently developed onSustainable Consumption and Production. All thesehave been driven by the United Nations, sincethe Johannesburg Summit in 2002, through theMarrakech Process. The Marrakech Process, inwhich the RAC/CP collaborates, promotes a changein production and consumption patterns at worldlevel, in order to achieve a change in the presenttendencies and make them compatible with theplanet and human activity.This tendency arrives at the same time as the greatestchallenge that humanity has ever faced, climatechange, and it is widely known that this challengerequires additional efforts, and effective forcefuland innovative action at all levels, immediate incharacter. This is why climate change was definedas a priority working area on government agendas,the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP) and the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP),amongst many others. 2008 and 2009 are keyyears in world politics, given that the route to followwas being prepared in 2009, the most ambitiousand global policy ever adopted with respectto environmental questions and lifestyle in general,directly affecting our models of production andconsumption.