EDITORIAL Sustainable Consumption and Production Arnold Tukker, Maurie J. Cohen, Klaus Hubacek, and Oksana Mont Our main conclusion is that the con- temporary understanding of the rela- tionship between consumer behaviors (and expenditures) and their associated environmental impacts has, as a result of considerable careful research over the past decade, now reached a ma- ture stage of development. The state of knowledge, however, is far less cer- tain with respect to questions pertaining to the role of policy measures to stim- ulate sustainable lifestyles, to facilitate sustainable consumer behaviors, and to forge sustainable systems of production and consumption. The future course of the planet depends on humanity’s ability to provide a dignified quality of life for a prospective 9 billion peo- ple without exhausting the earth’s resources or irreparably damaging its biogeochemi- cal systems. On the basis of this recog- nition, delegates at the World Summit on Sustainable Develop- ment (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in 2002, called on the interna- tional community to work toward improv- ing global living con- ditions and to “en- courage and promote the development of a ten-year framework of programmes on sus- tainable consumption and production (SCP) in support of re- gional and national initiatives to acceler- ate the shift towards SCP” (United Nations 2002). A major European Union−funded project— Sustainable Consumption Research Exchanges (SCORE!)—convened over the last few years a scientific network to support this initia- tive (the Marrakech Process). The SCORE! c  2010 by Yale University DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2009.00214.x Volume 14, Number 1 Network organized a number of workshops and conferences and produced various books, special issues, and proceedings reports (e.g., Tukker et al. 2008). The core of this spe- cial issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology comprises substantial- ly revised versions of papers originally pre- sented at the culmi- nating conference of the SCORE! initia- tive, held in Brussels in March 2008, and other contributions received through a targeted public solici- tation. This special issue is organized into four constituent parts. First, the editors have invited several leading figures in ongoing policy debates on SCP to contribute their views on the current status and future directions of these discussions. Included in this section are contributions by Mohan Munasinghe, former cochair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and current director gen- eral of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester (Munasinghe 2010); Randall Krantz, environment director of the World Economic Forum (Krantz 2010); and Secretary General John Hontelez and SCP Pol- icy Coordinator Doreen Fedrigo of the European Environmental Bureau (Fedrigo and Hontelez 2010). www.blackwellpublishing.com/jie Journal of Industrial Ecology 1