A Systematic Study of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interactions

By P. Pradhan, Luís Costa, Diego Rybski, Wolfgang Lucht, Jürgen P. Kropp. 2017

1,261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sustainable development goals (SDGs) have set the 2030 agenda to transform our world by tackling multiple challenges humankind is facing to ensure well‐being, economic prosperity, and environmental protection. In contrast to conventional development agendas focusing on a restricted set of dimensions, the SDGs provide a holistic and multidimensional view on development. Hence, interactions among the SDGs may cause diverging results. To analyze the SDG interactions we systematize the identification of synergies and trade‐offs using official SDG indicator data for 227 countries. A significant positive correlation between a pair of SDG indicators is classified as a synergy while a significant negative correlation is classified as a trade‐off. We rank synergies and trade‐offs between SDGs pairs on global and country scales in order to identify the most frequent SDG interactions. For a given SDG, positive correlations between indicator pairs were found to outweigh the negative ones in most countries. Among SDGs the positive and negative correlations between indicator pairs allowed for the identification of particular global patterns. SDG 1 (No poverty) has synergetic relationship with most of the other goals, whereas SDG 12 (Responsible consumption and production) is the goal most commonly associated with trade‐offs. The attainment of the SDG agenda will greatly depend on whether the identified synergies among the goals can be leveraged. In addition, the highlighted trade‐offs, which constitute obstacles in achieving the SDGs, need to be negotiated and made structurally nonobstructive by deeper changes in the current strategies.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc1b51c08b59cb4868140943f03a426bee81b56d

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Citations in the corpus

Sustainable Development Goals and the Forest Sector—a Complex Relationship (2019, background): “Some of these trade-offs with SDG 15 occur on a country level (SDG 1, SDG 4, and SDG 10), while others have been observed on a global level (SDG 3, SDG 6) [38].”
Quantitative assessment of agricultural sustainability reveals divergent priorities among nations (2021, positive): “51 While these statistical relationships between indicators do not imply direct causal linkages, they provide an indication of the trade-offs and synergies in a multi-target system with complex dynamics, and they can help to identify trade-offs that are not yet well recognized.”
Bioeconomy and SDGs: Does the Bioeconomy Support the Achievement of the SDGs? (2019, methodology): “The negative effects can be to some degree considered as the inherent trade-offs of the SDGs, which are also HEIMANN 54 highlighted by Pradhan et al. (2017).”
Analysing interactions among Sustainable Development Goals with Integrated Assessment Models (2019, background): “[16] systematically analysed the correlations between SDG indicators in a historical time series across the 227 countries for which data was available.”
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Are we successful in turning trade-offs into synergies? (2019, methodology): “Our analysis is therefore applying a similar method as described by Pradhan et al. (2017) in so far as we are examining SDG interlinkages as synergies (positive correlation) and trade-offs (negative correlation).”
Trade-offs between social and environmental Sustainable Development Goals (2018, background): “Since SDG interactions vary by country, it is essential to consider the specific context of a country when designing policies for sustainable development (Pradhan et al., 2017; Yonehara et al., 2017).”
The Inequality of Climate Change From 1.5 to 2°C of Global Warming (2018, background): “…warming to low levels, such as the 1.5°C Paris target, therefore represents an even greater constraint as to whether other SDGs can be successfully achieved (Nilsson et al., 2016) and suggests present estimates of synergies across SDGs with Goal 13 (Pradhan et al., 2017) may be underestimated.”