Abstract
Abstract The authors explore the link between the systems approach to sustainability and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were formally adopted by the UN in 2015. The systems approach depicts sustainable development as the intersection of the goals attributed to three interlinked systems: environmental (or ecological), economic and social. The authors illustrate how each of the 17 SDGs can be characterized as a goal primarily attributed either to the environmental, economic or social system, and as suggested by the systems approach, there may be important tradeoffs in attempting to attain all these goals simultaneously. By adopting standard methods of the theory of choice and welfare under imposed quantities, the authors show that is possible to measure the welfare effects of an increase in the indicator level for one SDG by identifying the tradeoffs that occur with achieving another goal. They present a quantitative assessment of current progress and tradeoffs among the 17 SDGs, using a representative indicator for each goal. They then conduct a preliminary welfare analysis of these tradeoffs through employing the approach developed in this paper. Although this analysis focuses on the potential tradeoffs among SDGs, the approach could also be applied to show complementarities, or “winwins”, in simultaneous progress among two or more SDGs. Such an analysis can help in the design of appropriate policy interventions to achieve specific SDGs, minimizing the potentially negative knock-on effects on some goals whilst capitalizing on the positive win-win impacts on other SDGs.
Highlights
Economic interpretations of sustainability usually take as their starting point the consensus reached by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987), which defined sustainable development as:"Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".But despite the universal approval of the WCED definition of sustainability, opinions still diverge on how this goal can be attained
To date, a key limitation to the systems approach to sustainability is that “there is no guidance as to how the tradeoffs among the goals of the various systems should be made” (Barbier and Markandya 2012, p. 38)
One of the first attempts in economics to explain sustainable development was the systems approach, which suggests that sustainability can only be achieved by balancing the tradeoffs among the various goals across environmental, economic and social systems (Barbier 1987; Barbier and Markandya 2012; Ekins 1994; Elliott 2006; Holmberg and Sandbrook 1992; Pezzey and Toman 2002)
Summary
Economic interpretations of sustainability usually take as their starting point the consensus reached by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987), which defined sustainable development as:. “The general objective of sustainable economic development, is to maximize the goals across all these systems through an adaptive process of trade-offs” (Barbier 1987, 104), which is illustrated by the intersection of the environmental, economic and social systems in the Venn diagram of Figure 1. Re-arranging the 17 SDGs by system, one obtains a revised and updated version of the Venn diagram of sustainability, where the SDGs are depicted as the new economic, environmental and social system goals (see Figure 2) Grouped in this way, the 17 SDGs represent the UN’s goals for attaining sustainable development across the three interlinked systems. Sustainability can only be achieved by balancing the tradeoffs among the various goals of the three systems, and what is required is an analytical approach for estimating these potential tradeoffs to show the gains and losses involved
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