Harvesting synergy from sustainable development goal interactions

Abstract

SignificanceThe sustainable development goals (SDGs) offer the global community a compelling vision and universally agreed-upon framework to achieve a sustainable and equitable future—but present a costly undertaking in the short term. Our research suggests that synergetic effects arising from appropriately designed policy mixes can bring significant cost savings and improve SDG attainment. Identifying and quantifying synergies requires innovative and unorthodox approaches to policy analysis such as those operationalized in our 3 pilots. The synergy assessment method and typology introduced in this paper are widely applicable, even though the patterns of synergies vary considerably between countries. Our pilot studies focus on national policy for the SDGs. Our approach is nevertheless generalizable to integrated planning at other scales and time horizons.

Achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals within 9 planetary boundaries

“…More fundamentally, despite some recent progress (e.g. Pedercini et al, 2019), these IAMs are still not configured for analysis of all the SDGs nor can they readily be modified to do so (Allen et al, 2016, van Vuuren et al, 2016, limiting their ability to responsively inform policymakers and civil society about SDG implementation. Many actors are calling for changes well beyond 'business as usual' (Cohen, 2018;Hagedorn et al, 2019), so it is timely to supplement the large IAMs with transparent dynamic tools that are cheap to run by everyone and easy to understandfor both the model user and the eventual user of model insights.…”

Integrated simulation for the 2030 agenda†

“…A strong emphasis is placed on training country nationals in system dynamics for sustainable development planning. The iSDG has to date been implemented at national and regional scale in over a dozen countries (Collste et al ., 2017; Pedercini et al ., 2018; Pedercini et al ., 2019). This model specifically is described further in Section 3.…”

“…Scenarios consisting of multiple interventions can be analyzed, along with potential synergies arising from the interaction of policies. The iSDG model has been applied to date in over a dozen countries, including Tanzania, Côte d'Ivoire (Pedercini et al ., 2018), Nigeria (UNDP, 2019), and Senegal (Pedercini et al ., 2019).…”

Participatory pathways to the Sustainable Development Goals: inviting divergent perspectives through a cross-scale systems approach

“…Transformations to sustainable societies requires going beyond silos, and having integration at the core, as highlighted by the 2030 Agenda resolution through formulating the SDGs as "universal and indivisible" (United Nations 2015, Scoones et al 2019. Siloed approaches may oversee system complexity -with the risk of unintended consequences, policies not sufficiently accounting for synergies or trade-offs (Pedercini et al 2019) and goal spill-overs on temporal and spatial scales (Engström et al 2019). While there are many ways of integrating, including e.g.…”