The sustainome of global goal interactions varies by country income and is disproportionately influenced by inequalities

By David Lusseau, Francesca Mancini. 2018

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We interact with each other and our environment in rich and complex ways. These interactions form socioecological systems in which human, economic, or natural resources are used and replenished. In 2015, the United Nations set seventeen sustainable development goals (SDGs) to attempt to change the way we live and create by 2030 a sustainable future balancing equitable prosperity within planetary boundaries. We have tended to tackle SDGs in isolation and now we realise that a key hurdle to SDG implementation are conflicts arising from SDG interactions. We estimate here for the first time the sustainome, a global picture of those interactions, and determine the main hurdles to maximising SDG implementation. We show that the relative contribution of SDGs to global sustainable success differ by country income. SDG conflicts within the sustainome mean that we must find new ways to address the impacts of climate change, approaches to reducing inequalities and responsible consumption. Focussing on poverty alleviation and reducing inequalities will also have compounded positive effects on the sustainome. This network approach to sustainability provides a way to prioritise SDG and contextualise targets. Many conflicts are emerging from the way we interact with each other and with our planet. Since 1992, we have embarked on a range of global initiatives to find a more sustainable and equitable solution to these interactions. In 2015, we set a 15-year plan , composed of 17 sustainable development goals and 169 associated targets, to promote prosperity for all while protecting our planet . Those goals touch on all aspect of human life and therefore interact in complex ways. We know that goal interactions can lead to conflicts and barriers to our plan . While we are investigating interactions between some goal pairs, we do not have a complete picture of those global interactions to date. This is important as efforts to meet SDGs in isolation may be counter-productive 5 if they affect other SDGs negatively. Not all interactions may be negative and therefore we may also play on SDG effects on others for our efforts to have compounded effects on multiple goals. Studying the topology and drivers of interaction networks has given us crucial insights in the study of complex systems such as health , ecosystems 8 and our societies . Here we propose to take a similar network approach to the SDGs and estimate the sustainome, the system of SDG interactions. We propose to

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ddd0af94da48c1c6406709da3a347dae941ee965