Resource productivity and sustainable development: Challenges and limitations The United Nations' Agenda for Sustainable Development underlines 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets. The lack of holistic knowledge on the interdependency between the SDGs and an interpretation of cause-and-effect relationships that connect the SDGs enormously challenges national policymakers that must implement that are in charge of implementing the 2030 agenda at the national level and achieving the goals across environmental, economic, and social dimensions (Griggs et al. 2017; Dörgo et al. 2018). The international scientific community started to measure the trade-offs and synergies between SDGs. For this exercise, it proved helpful to make use of the concept of the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, which showed that when addressing challenges like water, energy and food security, integrated approaches to resources management across these sectors should be used and dependent resources considered equally (Hoff 2011). The WEF nexus concept is now starting to be implemented and is recognised as an essential tool for achieving and monitoring progress towards SDGs (Bleischwitz et al. 2018; Hülsmann & Ardakanian 2018). Nevertheless, the WEF is still challenged by a few limitations, in particular concerning comprehensive coverage of the interlinkages between sectors and resources (Albrecht et al. 2018). Besides, nexus assessments are only starting to address all dimensions of sustainability, including the environmental aspect, one primary reason being that ecosystem services (WEF-E) are hardly reflected in nexus tools (Hülsmann et al. 2019). This chapter aims to highlight the necessity of including innovative tools in the assessment of the WEF nexus approach to adopt resources management to achieve Sustainable development. To effectively counteract the potential trade-offs across SDGs, holistic ecosystem management and sustainable practices are required to increase resource productivity. Sector-oriented resource management often neglects the potential impacts (trade-offs and synergies
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.