Developing countries bear a large part of the climate, biodiversity, and pollution impacts of resource-intensive production processes, without reaping their benefits. This situation has been made worse by the impacts of the pandemic. As part of sustainable global pandemic recovery strategies, the implementation of sustainable consumption and production will maximize the socio-economic benefits of resource use while minimizing the impacts.

In 2021, 83 policy instruments supporting the shift to sustainable consumption and production were reported by 26 countries, bringing the total number of policies developed, adopted, and/or implemented up to 438 (as reported by 59 countries and the European Union for 2019–2021). However, the distribution of reported sustainable consumption and production policies has so far been uneven, with 79 percent of policies reported by high-income and upper-middle-income countries, 0.5 percent by low-income countries, and only 7.7 percent by least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, and small island developing States.

The global material footprint continues to grow, although the pace has slowed. The average annual growth rate of the global material footprint for 2015–2019 was 1.1 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for 2000–2014, indicating a slowdown in the growth of economic pressure on the environment.

The proportion of food lost globally after harvest on the farm, transport, storage, wholesale, and processing levels is estimated at 13.3 percent in 2020, with no visible trend since 2016, suggesting that structural patterns of food losses have not changed. At the regional level, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of losses at 21.4 percent, with food being lost in large quantities between the farm and retail levels.

In addition to food loss, it is estimated that 931 million tons of food, or 17 percent of total food available to consumers in 2019, was wasted at the household, food service, and retail levels. Subsequent evidence suggests that household food waste declined during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns but has since returned to pre-pandemic levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the global pollution crisis, in particular plastics pollution, making the effective implementation of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants so much more urgent and important. The year 2021 was marked by the establishment of a new global regime for controlling the trade of plastic wastes for better transparency and tracing, following the adoption of the plastic waste amendments to the Basel Convention in 2019.

A preliminary analysis from a sample of over 10,000 public companies around the world shows that over 60 percent of large companies published sustainability reports in 2021, a twofold increase from 2016. The sustainability indicators that are most widely disclosed by companies include direct CO2 emissions, board diversity E/2022/55 22-06472 19/25, and the number of board meetings, while the least disclosed indicators include ozone-depleting substances, gender pay gap, and bribery and fraud controversies.

By December 2020, 40 countries had reported on sustainable public procurement policies and action plans (or equivalent legal dispositions) to encourage the procurement of environmentally sound, energy-efficient products and to promote more socially responsible purchasing practices and sustainable supply chains.

In 2020, Governments spent $375 billion on subsidies and other support for fossil fuels. While consumer subsidies decreased compared with 2019, this has been due largely to low oil prices and decreased demand during the pandemic rather than to structural reforms.