Mapping synergies and trade-offs between energy and the Sustainable Development Goals

By Francesco Fuso Nerini, J. Tomei, Long Seng To, I. Bisaga, Priti Parikh, Mairi J. Black, A. Borrion, C. Spataru, Vanesa Castán Broto, G. Anandarajah and 2 more. Nature Energy, 2017

971 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—including 17 interconnected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets—is a global plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. SDG7 calls for action to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Here we characterize synergies and trade-offs between efforts to achieve SDG7 and delivery of the 2030 Agenda as a whole. We identify 113 targets requiring actions to change energy systems, and published evidence of relationships between 143 targets (143 synergies, 65 trade-offs) and efforts to achieve SDG7. Synergies and trade-offs exist in three key domains, where decisions about SDG7 affect humanity’s ability to: realize aspirations of greater welfare and well-being; build physical and social infrastructures for sustainable development; and achieve sustainable management of the natural environment. There is an urgent need to better organize, connect and extend this evidence, to help all actors work together to achieve sustainable development. The UN’s Agenda for Sustainable Development has 17 goals with 169 targets for action across a range of issues, with access to sustainable energy for all being Goal 7. This Perspective analyses interlinkages between energy systems, Goal 7 and the other goals at the target level, identifying synergies and trade-offs between them.

Subfields: Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a47953c94ef3f8ac64326025abe065d2d7181795

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Citations in the corpus

Sand, gravel, and UN Sustainable Development Goals: Conflicts, synergies, and pathways forward (2021, positive): “Thisprovidesamoreconservativeestimateofsynergiesand conﬂicts with the SDGs compared with the original eight-point scoring sys-tem 143,145 that differentiates between strong and soft synergies or conﬂicts.”
The political economy of negative emissions technologies: consequences for international policy design (2018, background): “Thus, a safeguard procedure would need to operationalize selected goals, targets and indicators of the SDGs in a way that addresses key concerns over NETs (Fuso Nerini et al., 2017).”
Flexibility capital and flexibility justice in smart energy systems (2019, background): “scholarship in this area takes in a broad range of issues, from subjects like access to modern energy services (Nerini et al., 2018) and impacts of solid fuel cook stoves (Haigler, 2011) which are more relevant in Global South contexts, to issues of transition (such as from coal to natural gas [Finl”
Electricity access and income inequality in South Africa: Evidence from Bayesian and NARDL analyses (2020, background): “This is evidential in the intermediate commodity role played by energy, therefore, progress on access to electricity is not just an end but as a means towards achieving other SDGs [21].”
Quantitative assessment of agricultural sustainability reveals divergent priorities among nations (2021, positive): “51,52 Based on the historical records of the SAM indicators (Figure 4), we investigated the trade-offs and synergies among indicators in each country (Figure 5), where statistically signiﬁcantly (Spearman correlation p 0.05) positive (or negative) correlations between a pair of indicators’ time…”
The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, background): “In particular, the interdependencies among the food, energy, and water systems are central to the global sustainability question (e.g., Nerini et al., 2017).”