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

Open Education and the Sustainable Development Goals: Making Change Happen

Education for All has been a concept at the heart of international development since 1990 and has found its latest instantiation within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as SDG 4, ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. Open education, in the form of resources and practices are both seen as contributors to SDG4 as evidenced by the recent 2nd World Open Educational Resources Congress. The ambition for open education to contribute to the SDGs is clear from this and other gatherings but the means to make it happen are not as clear, and many have claimed that little has happened since the SDGs were launched in 2015. To help address this apparent gap, this paper (1) sets out the scale and scope of the SDGs; (2) reviews the potential contribution of open educational resources and practices to support the SDGs, and (3) uses a framing of power and systems thinking to review the way open education activities might be fostered within tertiary education in all local, national and regional contexts in order to support the SDGs, and not just SDG 4. It will also tentatively propose a theory of change that brings together power relationships, systems thinking and open education as key components and provide a case study of how this might work in practice through a newly funded project proposal. It is hoped that this theory of change and proposal will be a starting point for wider debate and discussion on how to make change happen in this important arena

The Sustainable Development Goals: One-Health in the World’s Development Agenda

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, embody a One-Health strategy—healthy people living on a habitable planet. Extending beyond the social development emphasis of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which accelerated progress globally, though unequally, the SDGs also encompass a range of environmental and economic goals, with a health goal that is far more comprehensive than the infectious diseases and maternal/child health focus of the MDGs. To be achieved, the SDGs require resources and political commitment that is yet to be demonstrated. With a cost that could reach $5 trillion for the SDGs overall, achieving health targets will require a mix of increase domestic resources, including taxes on unhealthy foods and products, international assistance, and innovative financing. Annual reviews should identify and monitor threats to the SDGs, both internal contradictions and contradictory government policies such as discriminatory laws, and the necessary rights-based pathways forward. To improve accountability, health information systems with disaggregated data should be prioritized, along with independent monitoring and key governance indicators. Ambitious national benchmarks, drawing on WHO strategies and action plans, could provide markers of success for presently vague health targets. Three early indicators of progress on the health SDGs could be: 1) whether countries establish clear policies on universality, encompassing all people without discrimination, identifying and prioritizing populations with the least access; 2) whether universal health coverage fully incorporates population health; and 3) whether countries provide rapid and sustained increased funding for such necessities as adequate sanitation and nutritious food. A Framework Convention on Global Health, a global health treaty based in the right to health, could fill in critical gaps in the SDGs, creating accountability through capacity-building and compliance-enhancing mechanisms, establishing a financing framework, and ensuring right to health assessments and health in all policies. It could help establish a path forward based on equity and the right to health that would be truly transformative

Mapping the sustainable development goals into the EDINSOST sustainability map of bachelor engineering degrees

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This Research to Practice Work in Progress paper presents the work conducted on the use of the Sustainability Map of Bachelor Engineering Degrees (a tool developed by the EDINSOST project) to analyze how Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are developed in each Degree. Over recent years, there has been a growth in the importance of working sustainability based on the SDGs. To identify which learning objective of each SDG corresponds to each learning outcome of the EDINSOST Sustainability Map, a correspondence matrix has been defined. The matrix contains the learning outcomes of the EDINSOST Sustainability Map in its rows, and the 17 SDGs in the columns. The cells of the matrix contain the learning objectives of the SDGs that correspond to each learning outcome of the EDINSOST Sustainability Map. This work in progress presents the first results of the process of mapping the SDGs into the EDINSOST Sustainability Map of Engineering Bachelor Degrees. Early results show that some of the 169 learning objectives are not applicable to Engineering Degrees. Likewise, we have seen that learning objectives have been defined more for policy makers than for engineers, and therefore adaptation is not an easy task. However, the work done has helped us to verify that the EDINSOST Sustainability Map can help in the introduction of the SDGs into the curriculum.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Environmental justice and the SDGs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions

Through their synergies, trade-offs, and contradictions, the sustainable development goals (SDGs) have the potential to lead to environmental justices and injustices. Yet, environmental justice (EJ), and social justice more broadly, are not currently embedded within the language and spirit of the SDGs. We part from the premise that “many ‘environmental’ problems are, by their very nature, problems of justice” (Lele, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Water 4:e1224, 2017). We review progress in EJ frameworks in recent years, arguing for the need to move beyond a focus on the four principles of mainstream EJ (distribution, procedure, recognition, and capabilities) towards a more intersectional decolonial approach to environmental justice that recognises the indispensability of both humans and non-humans. EJ frameworks, and the SDGs should recognise power dynamics, complex interactions among injustices, and listens to the different ‘senses of justice’ and desires of theorists, activists, and other stakeholder from the Global South. We analyze how EJ frameworks are, or fail to be, incorporated in the SDGs with a focus on the food–water–health nexus (SDG2, 3, 6); climate-energy (SDG7, 13), conservation (SDG14, 15); and poverty and inequality (SDG1, 10). We call attention to the ‘elephant in the room’—the failure to go beyond GDP but instead include economic growth as a goal (SDG8). We argue that sustainable degrowth and intersectional decolonial environmental justices would create better conditions for the transformative changes needed to reach the broader aim of the SDGs: to leave no one behind

Stochastic differential games for fully coupled FBSDEs with jumps

This paper is concerned with stochastic differential games (SDGs) defined through fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) which are governed by Brownian motion and Poisson random measure. For SDGs, the upper and the lower value functions are defined by the controlled fully coupled FBSDEs with jumps. Using a new transformation introduced in [6], we prove that the upper and the lower value functions are deterministic. Then, after establishing the dynamic programming principle for the upper and the lower value functions of this SDGs, we prove that the upper and the lower value functions are the viscosity solutions to the associated upper and the lower Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman-Isaacs (HJBI) equations, respectively. Furthermore, for a special case (when $\sigma,\ h$ do not depend on $y,\ z,\ k$), under the Isaacs' condition, we get the existence of the value of the game.Comment: 33 page

Agenda 2030: Preventing Violence Against Children and the Sustainable Development Goals

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -- ratified by world leaders in September -- provide a blueprint for action to end poverty, protect the environment, and build a safer and more just world through the year 2030. The SDGs are unprecedented for inherently linking the prevention of violence against children to a broad human development agenda in industrialized and developing countries alike. In particular, they underscore the intersections between eradicating violence against children -- explicitly called for under Target 16.2 and linked to many other related targets -- and sustainable development across generations

Analysing climate action plans of selected UK cities for their SDG alignment

In UK, the Climate change Act of 2008 has placed a binding target of reducing the net carbon emission in 2050 by at least 80% compared to the 1990 baseline. With a high share of urban population, the contribution of cities and urban areas towards climate change mitigation and adaptation becomes crucial. UK being a signatory to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2016, there is a new emphasis on the sustainability of cities as well. In this paper, a preliminary analysis of climate action initiatives of three UK cities (Bristol, Leicester and Milton Keynes) and their alignment with the SDG is presented. We used a text mining approach to analyse the climate action plans and then use this to map the alignment with the SDGs. We find that climate action plans have not focused on the sustainable development goals or the SDGs and their focus remains limited mainly to mitigation activities through promotion of renewable energies at homes and in buildings and actions on transport. However, climate action plans could influence a significant number of SDGs and an integrated approach could be beneficial for the cities and their residents