Low Impact Development practices in the context of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: A new concept, lessons learned and challenges

The <scp>SDGs</scp>: A change agenda shaping the future of business and humanity at large

This study dwells on xenophobia and the realities of actualizing the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) eight in South Africa. It argues that since the emergence of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, which transited to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, there has been a proliferation of literature from scholars of diverse disciplinary orientations. However, none of these studies deal with the phenomenon of xenophobia as a milestone for the attainment of the SDGs in South Africa. This paper, therefore, serves as an intervention to discuss how xenophobia affects the realization/ actualization of the UN’s SDG eight in the area under consideration. Using extant literature and the rational choice theory, it affirms that without peace and partnership with other countries, it would be very difficult for South Africa to attain the UN SDGs it envisages to achieve. To be focused and in-depth in the analysis of the phenomena under consideration the study centers exclusively on the UN SDG eight (even though there are seventeen SDGs of the UN) which hinges on decent work and economic growth. The evidence thrown up led to the major conclusion that the persistent xenophobic attacks and the resultant massive destruction of lives and businesses of foreigners, South Africa’s quest for the full-fledged realization of United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal eight would remain mere paperwork. Given the increasing prevalence of xenophobic attacks in the study area, the paper suggests, among others, the building of meaningful, lasting, and effective partnerships. This entails that xenophobia in the country will be nipped in the bud.

Assessing the contribution of water and energy efficiency in green buildings to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Jordan

Deforestation of rainforests requires active use of UN's Sustainable Development Goals

Since the launch of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the SDGs have been widely adopted by governments and corporations in an effort to improve their sustainability. There are 17 SDGs, comprising 169 targets, which are measurable against 247 unique indicators. Despite pervasive global pollution from (micro)plastics, there is only one indicator (14.1.1b) under Goal 14, specifically related to reducing impacts from (micro)plastics. Reliable reporting and monitoring of 247 SDG indicators present unique challenges for governments and organizations to implement, which may be further exacerbated by the pervasive nature of (micro)plastic pollution if not properly monitored across these indicators. This review focused on recent literature to provide a critical overview of the key challenges specifically related to (micro)plastics as they may undermine the implementation of sustainable strategies and action plans required to achieve the UN SDGs. • (Micro)plastics threaten global social, environmental, and economic sustainability. • The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed to address global threats. • Only Goal 14 specifically addresses impacts of (micro)plastic pollution. • (Micro)plastic pollution directly or indirectly impacts at least 12 UN SDGs. • (Micro)plastic pollution may undermine the implementation of the UN SDGs.

The World Health Organization recognizes that physical activity (PA) during childhood is crucial for healthy development, aligning well with the achievement of several United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study aimed to explore the associations between 10 key indicators of PA for children and adolescents assessed in the Global Matrix 4.0 project, and the UN SDGs. Data from 57 countries/jurisdictions of the Global Matrix 4.0 project were used. The UN SDG indicators were sourced from the SDG Transformation Center, which publishes each country's performance on each of the 17 SDGs. Given the robust evidence supporting plausible links between PA and SDGs 3 (good health and well-being), 9 (industry, innovation, and infrastructure), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), 13 (climate action), and 16 (peace, justice, and strong institutions), these SDGs were investigated. Countries/jurisdictions with good and moderate performance in achieving SDG 3, SDG 9, SDG 11, and SDG 16 had higher grades than countries/jurisdictions with fair performance in achieving these SDGs for the following indicators: Organized Sports and PA, Community and Environment, and Government Investments and Strategies. However, countries/jurisdictions with good performance in achieving SDG 13 had lower grades than countries/jurisdictions with fair performance in achieving SDG 13 for the following indicators: Organized Sports and PA, Community and Environment, and Government Investments and Strategies. Organized Sports and PA, Community and Environment, and Government Investments and Strategies were the indicators that demonstrated differences between countries/jurisdictions with good and poor performance in achieving the SDGs.

Financial incentives for large-scale wetland restoration: Beyond markets to common asset trusts

ABSTRACTJordan faces stringent energy challenges mainly in the form of import dependence and escalating demand. The building sector accounts for 58% of total national electricity consumption and therefore plays an important role in addressing these challenges. This article investigates how energy efficiency in green buildings certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system contribute towards achieving United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Jordan. Furthermore, this paper proposes a new Comprehensive Contribution to Sustainable Development Index (CCSDI) to assess the contributions of implementation of the LEED 2009 prerequisites and credits in the Energy and Atmosphere (EA) category to achieve UN SDGs in Jordan. Questionnaire surveys were conducted to obtain data. Relative Importance Index (RII) method was used to evaluate the contributions of LEED 2009 prerequisites and credits in the EA category. Results indicate a positive relationship between the LEED 2009 prerequisites and credits in category and UN SDGs 7−9 and 12−13. We conclude that our proposed CCSDI is a robust tool for assessing the contribution of energy efficiency in LEED 2009 certified green buildings towards achieving UN SDGs in Jordan.

The role and importance of sustainability are increasing multi-fold, and responsible organizations across the globe are aligning with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Integrating the UN SDGs into marketing education, especially curriculum, has received scant attention in the marketing education literature, even though 880 business schools have become Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) signatories. This exploratory study attempts to address the gap. It describes an instructor’s attempt to integrate two SDGs, 8 and 12, into a marketing elective course, BoP &amp; Rural Markets, using an experiential rural market project. The students were asked to use the lens of SDG 8 and 12 to understand the rural marketplace and its stakeholders during their field visit. This article describes the rural market project, spread across four experiential learning stages, and assesses its impact on sensitizing the students about SDGs. The whole experience, with its challenges and potential areas for improvement, is shared, and some lessons for marketing educators are identified. Finally, this article highlights some limitations of the approach and pinpoints directions for future work. In sum, this experiential project, a unique pedagogical intervention, helped increase the participants’ awareness and encouraged them to come up with possible recommendations for the issues around the two SDGs.

To identify research that addresses the biggest problems facing the world today, researchers have used the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a blueprint for measuring the societal impact of research. Although one might assume that the mapping of papers to the SDGs has a high degree of uniformity (based more or less on the same data), empirical results show that this is not the case: different mapping approaches lead to different assignments. The central aim of this paper is to use the National Open Research Analytics (NORA, Technical University of Denmark) database not only to test the agreement between four SDG mapping approaches [Web of Science (WoS)TM, OSDG, Scopus-ML, Scopus-SM], but also to investigate whether an overarching SDG mapping can be found (a gold standard). N = 526,520 Danish publications are analyzed with respect to the following aspects: distribution of SDGs over publications, agreement between SDG mapping approaches, prediction of SDG assignments, and the gold standard combining assignments from different mapping approaches (occupancy analysis). The main findings are as follows: 35.5% of the documents have at least one SDG assignment. The SDG occupancy is low, with the highest occupancy and detection probability for SDG 3 “Good health and well-being”. Agreement between SDG mapping approaches is low to moderate. The result of the gold standard analysis is not only the determination of a “true” SDG status of a publication and the frequency of the SDG assignments (occupancy), but also the uncertainty associated with this SDG assignment (detection probability).

The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an opportunity to improve soil science education on sustainability because they provide specific context to educate faculty and students from various disciplines, including Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) about SDGs. Soil science is a STEM discipline with a wide range of applications in the SDGs. The objectives of this study were to use a matrix approach (framework for presenting options for discussion and implementation) to integrate SDGs into an existing introductory soil science course taught to undergraduate students from different STEM fields (environmental and natural resources; wildlife biology; and forestry). The course was enriched with a lecture on SDGs and students were asked to link soil properties and class activities to specific SDGs. A post-assessment survey revealed an increase in students’ familiarity with SDGs, and their relevance to soil properties and course activities. Students acknowledged the importance of soils and individual actions for achieving the SDGs. There was an overall increase in student familiarity (+59.4%) with SDGs. Most students agreed (46.7%) and strongly agreed (23.3%) that the course activities were an effective way to learn about SDGs with examples from soil science. Identified learning gaps in subject matter found through the surveys on SDGs were clarified during later classroom discussions. The advantage of this teaching approach is that it seamlessly integrates SDGs with existing course materials while relying on students’ critical thinking skills to effectively analyze soil science information and form a judgement on how it relates to SDGs.

This paper highlights the extent of the relationships between circular economy (CE) practices and the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, the paper takes part in academic debates regarding CE and SDGs. It qualitatively investigates national governments’ policy response and practices, with a focus on Bangladesh. The study finds varying degrees of momentum in the national policy response to SDGs and thus, it answers two research questions: (i) what is the relevance of CE practices to the United Nations (UN) SDGs? (ii) What are the responses from the Bangladeshi government to fulfil the UN SDGs regarding sustainable consumption and production with CE? As CE is a global trend, the research suggests that broad, conscientious connection and collaboration at the national level are essential. The findings implicate national governments in developing countries and UN SDGs for their policies and programme reassessment, considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sustainable development.

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;AuScope is Australia&amp;amp;#8217;s National Geoscience Research Infrastructure Program. As outlined in is 2020-2030 10-year Strategy&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;1&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;, AuScope seeks to provide a world-class research physical and digital infrastructure to help tackle Australia's key geoscience challenges, in particular, food and water sustainability, minerals and energy security, and mitigating impact from geohazards. These challenges tie in directly with the following United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG#6 (Clean Water and Sanitation); SDG#7 (Affordable and Clean Energy); SDG#8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth); SDG#9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure); SDG#13 (Climate Action) and SDG#15 (Life on Land).&amp;amp;#160;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;The SDGs were set in 2015 by the UN General Assembly to be achieved by the year 2030. If the global research sector is to support achieving them, is a rethink required? Current practices tend to focus on building infrastructures in domain and/or national/regional and/or sector (research, government, private) and/or institutional/network silos. These are not necessarily enabling global interoperability, reuse and open sharing of data. For example, AuScope is building high-quality geoscience research data and software infrastructures that are at the heart of positioning Australia to meet these SDG challenges. Equivalent geoscience research infrastructures are also being built internationally (EPOS (Europe); EarthScope, EarthCube (USA)) and AuScope is looking for ways to interoperate more effectively with these.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;#160;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Within the international geoscience community some interoperable networks are in place to enable global collaborations that share data and software (e.g., Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), which develops software infrastructure for the management, dissemination, and analysis of model output and observational climate data; the Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN) enables members to coordinate station siting and provide free and open data). However, these are the exceptions rather than the rule.&amp;amp;#160;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;None of the SDGs depend exclusively on geoscience data: all require integration with data from other domains, particularly from the social sciences and humanities. Some initiatives trying to assist data combination between the social sciences and the physical or environmental sciences are emerging (e.g., the Data Documentation Initiative - Cross Domain Integration (DDI-CDI)&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;2&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;; the CODATA/ISC Decadal programme on &amp;amp;#8220;Making data work for cross-domain grand challenges&amp;amp;#8221;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;3&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;) , but traditional organizational and funding arrangements do not usually facilitate this. While there are exemplars of how to achieve integration of global domain and cross-domain research infrastructures and data sharing frameworks, we urgently need to leverage these to develop a roadmap that enables global integration of data and research infrastructures, both within the geosciences and beyond, to ensure sustainable production of data, products and services that support the realisation of the UN SDGs by 2030. In doing so, potentially the main tension will be to ensure that in enabling the broader, global transdisciplinary goals of the SDGs that deeper domain science is not compromised, scarce expertise is not misdirected, and that infrastructure developments within the domains are not unduly hampered.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;1&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;https://www.auscope.org.au/news-features/strategy-and-investment-plan-launch&amp;amp;#160; &amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;2&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;https://ddi-alliance.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DDI4/pages/860815393/DDI+Cross+Domain+Integration+DDI-CDI+Review&amp;amp;#160; &amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;3&amp;lt;/sup&amp;gt;https://codata.org/initiatives/strategic-programme/decadal-programme/ &amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

Through efforts of the international Gender Summits and UN Women, it is evident that all United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets must be viewed from a gender perspective to ensure that the outcomes to achieve the SDGs benefit women and men equally. Our research, through the International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR), focuses on the extent to which sex and/or gender topics are explicitly covered in research related to the SDGs. Expanding on previous studies that investigated gender research from a topical perspective using the Scopus database (Elsevier 2017), we have developed an approach to detect and visualize the volume and proportion of research publications that include explicit mention of sex and/or gender terms. The approach described here offers a fresh perspective on both the UN SDGs and sex and gender in research by visualising the topical coverage of the publications in the corpus of each SDG as a term map, and then overlaying that view with the proportion of the publications associated with sex and gender topics. We show that attention to sex and gender topics is uneven across the SDGs, and that even where overlap between an SDG and consideration of sex and gender is high, significant topical areas of relevance to the SDG have little explicit connection with sex and gender. This study lays the groundwork for the evidence-based development of a roadmap toward greater integration of sex and/or gender across all SDGs as well as monitoring integration progress over time.

&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;The contribution of citizen science to addressing societal challenges has long been recognized. The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as an overarching policy framework and a roadmap to guide global development efforts until 2030 for achieving a better future for all, could benefit from the potential that citizen science offers. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the value of citizen science, particularly in addressing the data needs for SDG monitoring, among the UN agencies, national statistical offices, policy makers and the citizen science community itself. To address this challenge, we launched a Community of Practice on Citizen Science and the SDGs (SDGs CoP) in November 2018 as part of the EU Horizon 2020 funded WeObserve project.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;The SDGs CoP brings together citizen science researchers, practitioners, UN custodian agencies, broader data communities and other key actors to develop an understanding on how to demonstrate the value of citizen science for SDG achievement. The initial focus and the main objective of the SDGs CoP has been to conduct a research study to understand the contribution of citizen science to SDG monitoring and implementation. In this talk, we will present the work of the SDGs CoP. We will first discuss existing data gaps and needs for measuring progress on the SDGs, and then provide an overview on the results of a systematic review that we undertook within the CoP, showing where citizen science is already contributing and could contribute data to the SDG framework. We will provide concrete examples of our findings to demonstrate how citizen science data could inform the SDGs. We will also touch on the challenges for and barriers to the uptake of citizen science data for the SDG monitoring processes, and how to bring this source of data into the scope of official statistics.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;