The CSCP was created as an international non-profit 'think tank' and 'do tank', in a collaboration between the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Founded in 2005, the CSCP's professional 'Inner and Outer Planet' team has rapidly grown to experts from over 30 countries and more than 15 disciplines. Building on its broad range of work the CSCP has established three thematic teams. Additionally, it hosts the SWITCH-Asia Network Facility funded by the European Commission supporting projects in more than 19 countries.
Capacity building for a better future:
Systems thinking and scaling-up sustainable innovations are skills all change actors urgently need in radically improving our economy‘s physical structures and societal value systems to make them resilient for the future. The CSCP gathers the latest lessons learned and creates capacity building programmes for civil society organisations, businesses and policymakers to gain an insight into these processes.
Establishing new infrastructures to support sustainable innovations:
The CSCP works on conceptualising and visualising the future physical, social and virtual infrastructure we need for achieving sustainable ways of living.
Encouraging bottom-up participative models for sustainable innovation:
At the CSCP we encourage and support cross-pollination and provide the necessary coordination required by bringing together civil societies, governments, business and retailers to facilitate change. We identify and encourage collaboration and strategic alliances to move these stakeholders in the same direction and leverage faster change.
Areas of Work
The scope of the Centre’s activities comprises development, testing, implementation and monitoring of projects and programmes, enabling leapfrogging sustainable consumption and production patterns and practices, knowledge transfer, multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary networking and international partnerships. The programmes developed and carried out by the organization are built on three milestones: capacity building, establishment of infrastructures to support sustainable innovations and encouraging bottom-up participative models for sustainable innovation and its ripple effect on lifestyles.
Projects
The CSCP conducted various projects with and for diverse actors, such as national and European ministries, the European Commission, UNEP, multinational companies, as well as SMEs, European research institutes[3] and non-governmental and civil society organisations. The work of the CSCP can be divided into three core areas:
Applied Research
The CSCP had been working together with the retail and food sector on resource efficiency and hot-spot analysis. It also hosts a sustainability council, which includes consumer groups, CSOs, to provide advice to the sustainability labeling process of a leading retail company. On the political field the CSCP also supported the first phase of the EU Retail Forum and coordinate a Retail project with the European Topic Centre on SCP.
The CSCP also contributes to developing the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) Task Force report on international practices and experiences with sustainable consumption and production. The CSCP also co-organizes workshops to promote knowledge exchange to support and refine policy recommendations.
Networking and Communication
The CSCP also works on enabling and engaging dialogue with different stakeholders, NGOs, consumer groups and policy makers, for example by creating a platform on Sustainable Lifestyles (http://www.vision2050.net) and on Sustainable Innovation and Entrepreneurship (http://www.scaling-up.net). It also coordinates large-scale international projects, such as the SWITCH Network Facility (http://www.switch-asia.eu/), the SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles project (http://www.sustainable-lifestyles.eu/) or the Action Town project (http://action-town.eu/).
