Resource information
Jordan’s SCP Strategy and National Action Plan (NAP) is a nation-wide document that addresses key human activities with a particular impact on the Jordanian environment. The overall goal of the Strategy is to achieve a shift to sustainable patterns in three identified priority areas of consumption and production, namely agriculture/food production, transport, and waste management, to be met through the identification of operational objectives and specific actions. In addition, cross-cutting actions relevant to these areas are identified.The Vision at the basis of this document is as follows “Sustainable consumption and production patterns are integrated into the national sustainable development agenda in Jordan”. While the consequent Mission is “The implementation of the SCP National Strategy and Action Plan, focusing on mainstreaming sustainable consumption and production, is part of a comprehensive approach towards transforming into a green economy. This will be achieved starting with, but not limited to, agriculture/food production, transport, and waste management, resulting in job creation and improved economic competitiveness and sustainable development”.The National SCP identifies three main strategic objectives, as follows (i) establish a national platform for institutionalizing the process of mainstreaming SCP into relevant sectors’ plans at the national and regional levels; (ii) develop and implement agreed on national SCP objectives in order to promote and strengthen a circular and green economy and support the regional conventions and policy frameworks for sustainable development; and (iii) engage key national stakeholders in developing, practicing, and evaluating Sustainable Consumption and Production models and circular economy measures.The document suggests operational objectives related to the three main areas. They all go through the three phases indicated by the strategic objectives: (i) the development of regulatory frameworks and instruments to promote the sustainability in the sector; (ii) intervention at the level of infrastructures and technologies to minimize the impact of activities on the environment; and (iii) diffusion of public awareness and of the sector-involved national stakeholders together with the support for the development of appropriate market tools and information. Since the SCP NAP of Jordan has ‘life-cycle thinking’ at its core, the SCP approach entails taking into account the environmental and social impacts that a product or a service causes at each stage of its life cycle.To help eliminate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition, the document seeks to minimize resource and food waste in all the life cycle of the food and promote and sustainable diets with calls for increased consumption of fresh and organic vegetables, fruits and cereals as a health substitute or supplement of meat consumption.In order to make agriculture more productive and sustainable, main actions are directed to (i) adopt agricultural investment policies to improve standards of living and increase agricultural productivity; (ii) develop and mainstream provisions of the SCP in public land-use policy, which defines optimal land use for the highest yield and priority use of agricultural lands; (iii) introduce fiscal instruments favoring sustainable agriculture and food manufacturing practices and providing incentives for good environmental practices like Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and organic farming, tax exemption/reduction for sustainable agriculture/organic farming green entrepreneurs; (iv) remove incentives related to water tariff to agriculture in order to maintain the sustainability of surface and ground water resources and put incentives to use drought resistant seeds and incentives for drip irrigation system; (v) establish quality control, traceability, standards harmonization and certification schemes that confirm the sustainable production of food products; (vi) strengthen rehabilitation of national skills for inspection and certification purposes; (vii) Adopt Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) schemes for optimizing the use of different resources needed in agricultural areas; (viii) controlling the quantity of water extracted from wells to prevent salinization and utilizing waste water in areas close to treatment plants and for plant forage crops or any other crops which are not consumed directly by people; (ix) limit pumping of groundwater to set levels, to prevent water and soil salinization due to over-extraction; and (x) promote renewable energy-powered irrigation systems.Reduction of rural poverty will be helped giving priority to public investments in rural areas.To enable more inclusive and efficient agricultural systems, the Strategy proposes to (i) promote “Green Financing” policies for the sustainable agriculture and food consumption and production areas by facilitating access to loans and grants for farmers and food producers to maximize number of sustainable agriculture and food manufacturing activities and projects; (ii) promote the labeling (branding) of the sustainable organic farm products and locally produced food (including organic farm products and food and zero-kilometer products) and fair trade product; and (iii) establish networks for Jordan's organic agriculture farms and/or link with already established sustainable industries networking platforms/facilities.To increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, proposed actions are (i) promote energy labeling for vehicles and develop new fuels that are environmentally friendly and have a lower impact on climate change; and (ii) foster the establishment and implementation of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans and of National Sustainable Mobility Policies, also through the initiative called "Mobilize Your City" (MYC).As for the Governance, (i) the Ministry of Environment as a whole will be responsible for following up the proposed actions at the national and local levels, including through the set-up of enabling conditions to achieve the operational objectives of the Action Plan, along with insuring policy coherence and promotion of synergies among national stakeholders, to avoid overlap with other SCP and green economy initiatives; (ii) will be ensured a clear and efficient institutional set-up (where responsibilities are soundly defined, monitoring is in place and all actors operate in a coordinated manner) the new institutional set up should be capable of mainstreaming the provisions of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in all of the three main areas; and (iii) will be ensured a continuous review and update of policies, institutional set up and the organization of the sector, including economic tools and other instruments to support SCP.
