Snakes and ladders: World development pathways’ synergies and trade-offs through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

This paper takes three global visions of world development to 2050 and quantifies their implications for sustainable progress employing the metrics of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDG outcomes are structured through the interconnectivities of the three ‘wedding cake’ layers of ‘economy’, ‘society’ and ‘biosphere’, as posited by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The key policy contribution is to quantify the resulting SDG synergies and trade-offs, whilst also decomposing and calculating the part-worth of the market drivers which contribute to these outcomes. The paper employs a global economic simulation model that combines rational market behaviour with environmental constraints (MAGNET) and is further extended with an SDG metrics module. A ‘non-sustainable’ world reveals trade-offs between economy and biosphere SDGs, with population growth of particular concern to a safe planetary operating space in the world’s poorest regions. Sustainable visions could reduce natural resource pressures and emissions and meet energy requirements at potentially limited economic cost. Notwithstanding, these futures do not address income inequalities and potentially increase food security concerns for the most vulnerable members of society. Consequently, developed region led international cooperation and in-kind income transfers to developing countries, constitutes a necessary prerequisite to help remedy the SDG trade-offs exhibited within the more sustainable global pathways.

Distributed Ledger Technology Applications in Food Supply Chains: A Review of Challenges and Future Research Directions

“…More efforts should be dedicated to make blockchain, DLT, and IoT solutions in FSCs more sustainable, energyand cost-efficient. Recent studies provide evidence, that internationalization of various economic activities on a world-wide level are necessary for development of coherent policies for the SDGs, as well as understanding of various synergies and trade-offs associated with market instruments to implement the SDGs [84,93]. The impact of disruptions, such as COVID-19, on global markets, economies and practices is additionally highlighted, since the disruptions bring in efforts for policies, strategies and planning on international level [93].…”

“…Recent studies provide evidence, that internationalization of various economic activities on a world-wide level are necessary for development of coherent policies for the SDGs, as well as understanding of various synergies and trade-offs associated with market instruments to implement the SDGs [84,93]. The impact of disruptions, such as COVID-19, on global markets, economies and practices is additionally highlighted, since the disruptions bring in efforts for policies, strategies and planning on international level [93]. Therefore, novel supply chain processes should be designed to address the impact of disruptions on organizations, societies and FSCs [24].…”

The Role of Industrial Revival in Untapping the Bioeconomy’s Potential in Central and Eastern Europe

“…In the 2010s, an ever-increasing number of studies argued that the bioeconomy could be unsustainable with regard to the environment as well as the ecological functions of nature and could lead to the inefficient use of natural resources in addition to degradation [31][32][33]. Researchers emphasised that public policy should support a sustainable bioeconomy [33][34][35].…”

Tracking the Interlinkages across SDGs: The Case of Hill Centered Education Network in Bogota, Colombia

“…The interlinkages analysis and visualization tool, developed by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) [9] and the analytical frameworks proposed by European Commission [10] and International Council for Science [11] are just some examples of the multidimensional efforts devoted to promote a better understanding of the spill over effects. In a similar way, a large number of studies, have been specifically devoted to investigating the interactions of specific targets and goals, such as the analyses focusing on the Nexus approach [12,13] on the Integrated Assessment Models [14], on the use of indicators [15] and global CGE Models [16]. As pointed out by Weitz et al [17], these forward-looking modelling perspectives have mainly been used to investigate the interaction across targets and goals by (i) studying one specific goal to explore the relations with the others [18,19], (ii) grouping goals and targets to investigate the relationships existing among them [20], (iii) using scoring systems to analyse the interactions across the entire set of targets and goals [17,21,22].…”