Discussions on how to define, design, and implement sustainable development goals (SDG) have taken center stage in the United Nations since the Rio+20 summit. Energy is one of the issues that enjoyed consensus, before and after Rio, as an important area for SDGs to address. Many proposals have been put forward on how SDGs should be formulated and what areas they should cover, but there have been few attempts to develop a generic integrated framework within which diverse areas can be accommodated and treated in a coherent way. The purpose of this paper is to develop such a framework for SDGs and to demonstrate its application by elaborating specific target areas for the energy sector. Based on a review and integration of global debates around SDG and energy, the framework puts human wellbeing at the center of the agenda, with the supporting resource base and global public goods forming additional tiers. A complementary set of enabling goals is suggested with four layers: capacity & knowledge, governance & institutions, public policy, and investment & finance. An energy SDG is elaborated to illustrate the application of the framework. The illustrative SDG architecture for energy includes eight target areas: basic energy access, energy for economic development, sufficiency, renewable supply, efficiency, infrastructure, greenhouse gas emissions and security. These target areas are relevant for energy for all countries, but depending on national circumstances such as levels of development, the relative emphasis will be different between countries, and over time.

One of the next major challenges for research and policy on sustainability is setting the post-2015 Development Agenda. This challenge arises as a direct result of the formal ending of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015 and as an outcome of the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). The post-2015 Development Agenda is expected to include two agendas: one on human well-being to advance the MDG targets and the other on planetary well-being, which requires a safe-operating space‖ within the Earth's life-support system. In contrast to the MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are meant to apply to both developing and developed countries and create a space for development within the stable functioning of the Earth's systems. However, what might this all look like? For answers, this paper reviews the achievements and reflections of the MDGs to date and identifies new challenges entailed in the shift of development goals from-millennium‖ to-sustainable‖. While most of the existing studies look at these two sets of issues separately, combining the two reveals two important features of the SDGs. First, SDGs need to integrate both human and planetary well-being in a goal, and second, goals, or sub-goals, need to be formulated at multiple levels, from global to local levels. While the MDGs represented no integrated goals, some of the existing proposals on SDGs include integrated goals. However, our analysis has shown that they do not present the vertical diffusion of goals. Considering both integration and diffusion in the architecture of SDGs is a remaining task.

Cities are increasingly adopting potentially sustainable climate plans. Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into these plans could help stabilize the climate while generating jobs, narrowing equity gaps, fostering innovation, and delivering other sustainability benefits. Yet, how much cities are integrating the SDGs into climate plans remains poorly understood. This article shed light on this question with a text analysis of SDG “keywords” in climate plans for two British and two Japanese cities. The results revealed that none of the surveyed cities have connected climate with socioeconomic priorities covered in SDG1 (poverty), SDG8 (employment), SDG5 (gender), and SDG10 (inequalities). Meanwhile, the United Kingdom cities made more connections between climate and responsible consumption and production (SDG12) than the Japanese cities. Further, Kyoto, Japan shares a climate-SDGs linkages profile that resembles the United Kingdom cities more than Kawasaki. Though not without limitations, text analysis can facilitate the city-to-city peer learning needed to make urban climate plans sustainable within and across countries.

The authors wish to make the following correction, due to a typographical error, to this paper [1]. On page 1761, the author name “Shunsuke Mangagi” should be “Shunsuke Managi”. [...]

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