GRID-Arendal: Strategic Plan 2018-2021

GRID-Arendal’s 2018–2021 strategic plan was developed by the organization’s staff and focuses on the following concrete goals:

will help people to better understand the relationships between nature, its benefits to people and the quality of people’s lives.

Providing knowledge for action

Facilitating responsible use of resources

Goal 1: Environmental knowledge leads to actions to improve the health of natural systems and society.

Goal 2: Sharing sustainable solutions for natural resource management.

Knowledge of the environment, planetary limits and nature’s benefits to people are crucial to ensuring our planet is sustainable and equitable. Since its establishment in 1989, GRID-Arendal has consistently contributed to UN Environment’s mission of “keeping the environment under review.” The information we produce is used to assess environmental conditions and trends, including tracking progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Although assessing and monitoring environmental conditions is important, they are only the first steps towards action. Action involves putting policies and legal regimes in place that will ensure that the health of natural systems and society improves over time.

All human impacts on the environment can be linked directly or indirectly to the way that natural resources (defined in the broadest sense) are managed and consumed. The human footprint is global in scope and universal across ecosystems. Humans now consume one third of all primary productivity and around one quarter of all freshwater on earth. In order to achieve the environmental SDGs – especially responsible consumption and production, SDG-12 – resource exploitation through mining, agriculture, forestry and fishing must be managed sustainably and for the benefit of all. The lack of resources is not always the problem; rather, we need to better manage the resources we already have. Sharing and communicating solutions are key to progress because solutions that work in one place can often work in another location.

To achieve this goal, we will engage stakeholders and generate solutions to problems in participatory ways. We