Transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals Includes the SDG Index and Dashboards. Sustainable Development Report 2019

The Sustainable Development Report 2019 presents an updated SDG Index and Dashboards with a refined assessment of countries’ distance to SDG targets. The report has been successfully audited for the first time by the European Commission Joint Research Centre. New indicators have been included, primarily to refine the indicator selection on agriculture, diets, gender equality and freedom of speech. We have also added more metrics for international spillovers, including on fatal work accidents. A new website and data visualization tools are available (http://sustainabledevelopment.report). Once again, Nordic countries – Denmark, Sweden and Finland – top the SDG Index. Yet, even these countries face major challenges in implementing one or several SDGs. No country is on track for achieving all 17 goals with major performance gaps even in the top countries on SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 15 (Life on Land). Income and wealth inequalities, as well as gaps in health and education outcomes by population groups also remain important policy challenges in developing and developed countries alike. The Sustainable Development Report 2019 generates seven major findings: 1. High-level political commitment to the SDGs is falling short of historic promises In September 2019, heads-of-states and governments will convene for the first time in person at the UN in New York to review progress on their promises made four years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda. Yet, our in-depth analyses show that many have not taken the critical steps to implement the SDGs. Out of 43 countries surveyed on SDG implementation efforts, including all G20 countries and countries with a population greater than 100 million, 33 countries have endorsed the SDGs in official statements since January 1st, 2018. Yet in only 18 of them do central budget documents mention the SDGs. This gap between rhetoric and action must be closed. 2. The SDGs can be operationalized through six SDG Transformations SDG implementation can be organized along the following Transformations: 1. Education, Gender, and Inequality; 2. Health, Wellbeing, and Demography; 3. Energy Decarbonization and Sustainable Industry; 4. Sustainable Food, Land, Water, Oceans; 5. Sustainable Cities and Communities; and 6. Digital Revolution for Sustainable Development. The transformations respect strong interdependencies across the SDGs and can be operationalized by well-defined parts of governments in collaboration with civil society, business, and other stakeholders. They must be underpinned and guided by the principles of Leave No One Behind and Circularity and Decoupling of resource use from human wellbeing. 3. Trends on climate (SDG 13) and biodiversity (SDG 14 and SDG 15) are alarming On average, countries obtain their worst scores on SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 15 (Life on Land). No country obtains a “green rating” (synonym of SDG achieved) on SDG 14 (Life Below Water). Trends on greenhouse gas emissions and, even more so, on threatened species are moving in the wrong direction. These findings are in line with the recent reports from the IPCC and IPBES on climate change mitigation and biodiversity protection, respectively. 4. Sustainable land-use and healthy diets require integrated agriculture, climate and health policy interventions Land use and food production are not meeting people’s needs. Agriculture destroys forests and biodiversity, squanders water and releases one-quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions. In total, 78% of world nations for which data are available obtain a “red rating” (synonym of major SDG challenge) on sustainable nitrogen management; the highest number of “red” rating across all indicators included in the report. At the same time, one-third of food is wasted, 800 million people remain undernourished, 2 billion are deficient in micronutrients, and obesity is on the rise. New indicators on nations’ trophic level and yield gap closure highlight the depth of the challenge. Transformations towards sustainable landuse and food systems are required to balance efficient and resilient agriculture and forestry with biodiversity conservation and restoration as well as healthy diets

Links and trade-offs between fisheries and environmental protection in relation to the sustainable development goals in Thailand

The fisheries sector significantly contributes to global food security, nutrition, and livelihood of people. Its importance for economic benefits, healthy diets, and nutrition, and achieving sustainable food systems is highlighted by several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), i.e., SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), and SDG 14 (Life Below Water). However, due to unprecedented population levels, the contribution of the fisheries sector to fulfills these roles is challenging, particularly given additional concerns regarding environmental well-being and sustainability. From this perspective, this study aims to identify the links and trade-offs between the development of this sector and the environmental sustainability in Thailand via a critical analysis of their trends, current ecological impacts, and more importantly, their contributions to several individual SDGs. A time-series of Thailand's fisheries production from 1995 to 2015 indicates a recent reduction from around 3.0 million tons in 1995 to 1.5 million tons in 2015 of wild fish and shellfish from marine and freshwater habitats. The maximum sustainable yield of these species has been exceeded. Conversely, Thailand's aquaculture production has continued to grow over the last decade, resulting in a reduction of mangrove forest area, wild fish stocks, and water quality. While capture fisheries and aquaculture production significantly contribute to several SDG targets, there are potential trade-offs between their development and the achievement of SDGs within the planet dimension, i.e., SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 14, and SDG 15 (Life on Land). On the one hand, the mitigation of overfishing will be beneficial for the targets of SDG 14, leading to more sustainable resource management. On the other hand, it might cause a decrease in the volume of marine catches and economic and social profits. We conclude that the SDGs can serve as a framework for both policymakers and industrial workers to monitor and compromise on regulations that will optimize productivity in the context of sustainable development

Trade, transboundary impacts and the implementation of SDG 12

The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were developed to ‘transform our world.’ Yet critics argue that the concept of sustainable development serves to maintain an unsustainable status quo, or provide a positive gloss on a terminal conflict between its ‘pillars’: environmental protection, economic growth and social welfare. In this article, we examine this tension with respect to the implementation of SDG 12 in the European Union. SDG 12 calls for responsible consumption and production, which necessitates reconciling, or ‘decoupling’, economic growth and environmental degradation: the core of sustainable development. Initial examination reveals that the largest implementation gap is among high-consuming countries, including those of the EU, the focus of our article, who are failing to account for transboundary impacts of products consumed domestically. This shortcoming, facilitated by the flexibility of the SDG ‘global target, national action’ approach, undermines the achievement of other environmental SDGs relating to biodiversity and climate, among others. Yet, as compared to other EU approaches to addressing transboundary environmental harm from trade in existing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), which we examine, the global focus and breadth of SDG 12 offers transformative potential. Ultimately, even if the three pillars of sustainable development are not ‘rebalanced’ toward environmental conservation, they can provide a construct for examining interactions and trade-offs between goals. Simply taking account of transboundary consumption, as SDG 12 indicators call for, would encourage more effective cooperation to help producing countries address environmental problems that result from production for export through impact assessment and enforcement

SDG 12: responsible consumption and production – potential benefits and impacts on forests and livelihoods

This chapter identifies and analyses the potential impacts and contributions of efforts to achieve SDG 12 Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) on forests and their conservation, sustainable management and use, as well as forest livelihoods. SCP has been part of the international policy discourse for more than four decades, but the uptake of SCP has not been smooth and has tended to be biased towards relatively weak measures. The inclusion of SCP in the SDG framework gives hope that SCP will receive stronger attention in the international efforts for sustainable development. Although SDG 12 targets or indicators make no direct reference to forests or forest communities, the chapter finds that SDG12 targets can contribute positively to forest protection and conservation efforts. The review of the SDG 12 targets does not point towards any direct trade-offs between achieving the SDG12 targets and protection of forest ecosystems, resources and livelihoods. SDG 12 can contribute to creating enabling conditions for advancing more responsible and sustainable supply of timber and other forest commodities, also linked to more responsible demand. To enhance forest conservation and livelihoods through SCP beyond 2030, an integrative SCP approach addressing systemic issues is needed

Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: 2017 Update and SDG Baselines

The JMP 2017 update report presents indicators and baseline estimates for the drinking water, sanitation and hygiene targets within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report introduces the indicators of safely managed drinking water and sanitation services, which go beyond use of improved facilities, to include consideration of the quality of services provided. For the first time, hygiene estimates are reported for 70 countries

Closed N=2 Strings: Picture-Changing, Hidden Symmetries and SDG Hierarchy

We study the action of picture-changing and spectral flow operators on a ground ring of ghost number zero operators in the chiral BRST cohomology of the closed N=2 string and describe an infinite set of symmetry charges acting on physical states. The transformations of physical string states are compared with symmetries of self-dual gravity which is the effective field theory of the closed N=2 string. We derive all infinitesimal symmetries of the self-dual gravity equations in 2+2 dimensional spacetime and introduce an infinite hierarchy of commuting flows on the moduli space of self-dual metrics. The dependence on moduli parameters can be recovered by solving the equations of the SDG hierarchy associated with an infinite set of abelian symmetries generated recursively from translations. These non-local abelian symmetries are shown to coincide with the hidden abelian string symmetries responsible for the vanishing of most scattering amplitudes. Therefore, N=2 string theory "predicts" not only self-dual gravity but also the SDG hierarchy.Comment: 41 pages, no figure

Towards understanding interactions between Sustainable Development Goals: the role of environment–human linkages

Only 10 years remain to achieve all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) globally, so there is a growing need to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of action by targeting multiple SDGs. The SDGs were conceived as an ‘indivisible whole’, but interactions between SDGs need to be better understood. Several previous assessments have begun to explore interactions including synergies and possible conflicts between the SDGs, and differ widely in their conclusions. Although some highlight the role of the more environmentally-focused SDGs in underpinning sustainable development, none specifically focuses on environment-human linkages. Assessing interactions between SDGs, and the influence of environment on them, can make an important contribution to informing decisions in 2020 and beyond. Here, we review previous assessments of interactions among SDGs, apply an influence matrix to assess pairwise interactions between all SDGs, and show how viewing these from the perspective of environment-human linkages can influence the outcome. Environment, and environment-human linkages, influence most interactions between SDGs. Our action-focused assessment enables decision makers to focus environmental management to have the greatest impacts, and to identify opportunities to build on synergies and reduce trade-offs between particular SDGs. It may enable sectoral decision makers to seek support from environment managers for achieving their goals. We explore cross-cutting issues and the relevance and potential application of our approach in supporting decision making for progress to achieve the SDGs