Life Cycle Initiative 2002-2022: Speeding up the transition to Sustainable consumption and production with Life Cycle Approaches/

The Life Cycle Initiative, hosted by UNEP, promotes life cycle knowledge, revealing the unintended trade-offs between circular approaches’ social, environmental, and economic impacts. This makes life cycle thinking essential for public and private decision-makers to foster progress towards sustainable production and consumption patterns. To achieve this, the Initiative works to build international consensus and access to science-based life cycle knowledge and tools and improve the application of life cycle knowledge by private and public decision-makers with (policy) advice and capacity building in high-impact sectors.

The Initiative was launched in 2002 by UNEP and the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) to enable the global use of credible life cycle knowledge. The 20 years of existence is a perfect moment to take stock of the achievements. And to look forward to discussing how the Initiative and the wider life cycle community could improve the application of the knowledge and tools to speed up the transition to sustainable consumption and production patterns using circular approaches without unintended trade-offs.