Cause-effect analysis for sustainable development policy

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The sustainable development goals (SDGs) launched by the United Nations (UN) set a new direction for development covering the environmental, economic, and social pillars. Given the complex and interdependent nature of the socioeconomic and environmental systems, however, understanding the cause-effect relationships between policy actions and their outcomes on SDGs remains as a challenge. We provide a systematic review of cause-effect analysis literature in the context of quantitative sustainability assessment. The cause-effect analysis literature in both social and natural sciences has significantly gained its breadth and depth, and some of the pioneering applications have begun to address sustainability challenges. We focus on randomized experiment studies, natural experiments, observational studies, and time-series methods, and the applicability of these approaches to quantitative sustainability assessment with respect to the plausibility of the assumptions, limitations and the data requirements. Despite the promising developments, however, we find that quantifying the sustainability consequences of a policy action, and providing unequivocal policy recommendations based on it is still a challenge. We recognize some of the key data requirements and assumptions necessary to design formal experiments as the bottleneck for conducting scientifically defensible cause-effect analysis in the context of quantitative sustainability assessment. Our study calls for the need of multi-disciplinary effort to develop an operational framework for quantifying the sustainability consequences of policy actions. In the meantime, continued efforts need to be made to advance other modeling platforms such as mechanistic models and simulation tools. We highlighted the importance of understanding and properly communicating the uncertainties associated with such models, regular monitoring and feedback on the consequences of policy actions to the modelers and decision-makers, and the use of what-if scenarios in the absence of well-formulated cause-effect analysis.