Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are offered as a comprehensive strategy to guide and encourage sustainable development at multiple scales both nationally and internationally. Furthermore, through the development of indicators associated with each goal and sub-goal, the SDGs support the notion of monitoring, evaluation and adaptive management, underpinned by the aspirations of social justice, equity and transparency. As such, the ethical intention of the SDGs is well founded. However, possible conflicts and trade-offs between individual SDGs have received little attention. For example, SDGs relating to poverty (SDG 1), inequality (SDG 10), food security (SDG2), economic development (SDG 8) and life in water and on land (SDGs 14 and 15), are potentially competing in many circumstances. In a social–ecological context, policy support and formulation are increasingly adopting systems approaches, which analyse the complex interactions of system elements. Adopting such an approach in this work, the above SDGs are analysed for coastal Bangladesh. This demonstrates multiple potential trade-offs between the SDGs, including agricultural farming approaches in the light of poverty reduction, and between economic growth and environmental integrity as well as equity. To develop coherent and policy relevant socio-ecological strategies, appropriate decision frameworks need to be co-developed across the range of stakeholders and decision-makers. Integrated models have great potential to support such a process.
Highlights
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) express aspirations for human development that require the realisation of a universal, but diverse set of ethical principles, such as inclusion, justice, equality, dignity, wellbeing, global solidarity, sharing, sustainability and public participation
This is certainly the case in coastal Bangladesh where economic growth is still exacting a substantial impact on the environment by placing an ever-increasing demand on natural resources
The clear message from this work shows that, since the 1980s, strategies to increase GDP in the Bangladeshi coastal zone have been associated with rising food and fish production levels, and an increase GDP by 17% (Figure 3), notwithstanding the limitations of GDP as a measure of poverty
Summary
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) express aspirations for human development that require the realisation of a universal, but diverse set of ethical principles, such as inclusion, justice, equality, dignity, wellbeing, global solidarity, sharing, sustainability and public participation. The SDGs are offered as a comprehensive set of goals to encourage sustainable development at multiple scales both nationally and internationally. They extend from the more familiar reductions in poverty to the more recent considerations of sustainable cities. The SDGs are divided into 169 targets, thereby representing an approach to benchmarking, monitoring and evaluating the progressive development of all nations following on from the relative success of the MDGs in line with principles of transparency and accountability. The SDGs and their targets are associated with each other in multiple ways, and these relationships need to be elucidated and explored [4]
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