To Achieve a Sustainable Blue Future, Progress Assessments Must Include Interdependencies between the Sustainable Development Goals

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals Requires Transdisciplinary Innovation at the Local Scale

Global decline in capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services

Planetary health: from concept to decisive action

Bioengineering textiles across scales for a sustainable circular economy

The UN’s Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) are the most significant global effort so far to advance global sustainable development. Bertelsmann Stiftung and the sustainable development solutions network released an SDG index to assess countries’ average performance on SDGs. Ranking high on the SDG index strongly correlates with high per person demand on nature (or “Footprints”), and low ranking with low Footprints, making evident that the SDGs as expressed today vastly underperform on sustainability. Such underperformance is anti-poor because lowest-income people exposed to resource insecurity will lack the financial means to shield themselves from the consequences. Given the significance of the SDGs for guiding development, rigorous accounting is essential for making them consistent with the goals of sustainable development: thriving within the means of planet Earth.

The politics of enabling tipping points for sustainable development

The European Commission's Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy, under the European Green Deal, acknowledges that innovative techniques, including biotechnology, may play a role in increasing sustainability. At the same time, organic farming will be promoted, and at least 25% of the EU's agricultural land shall be under organic farming by 2030. How can both biotechnology and organic farming be developed and promoted simultaneously to contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? We illustrate that achieving the SDGs benefits from the inclusion of recent innovations in biotechnology in organic farming. This requires a change in the law. Otherwise, the planned increase of organic production in the F2F strategy may result in less sustainable, not more sustainable, food systems.

Earth altruism

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 2015 to “end poverty and set the world on a path of peace prosperity and opportunity for all on a healthy planet” by 2030. This ambitious framework includes 17 goals (e.g., no poverty, zero hunger, good health, quality education, etc.) with 169 targets and 231 unique indicators. The SDGs have been widely adopted to guide policy makers in development efforts around the world, but they also have been criticized as too unwieldy and all-encompassing. The Economist (March 26, 2015) concluded that the “SDGs are unfeasibly expensive” and “are so sprawling and misconceived that the entire enterprise is being set up to fail.” Nevertheless, the SDGs are now an integral part of the global development movement and are often cited by advocates of specific interventions. The Sustainable Development Report 2020 (SDR2020) was prepared by teams of independent experts at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Bertelsmann Stiftung. It is separate from the The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020 published by the UN. The project is directed by Jeffry Sachs, who was an advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban-Ki Moon in the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and SDGs. As in previous years, the SDR2020 presents and aggregates data from all UN member states to describe each country's progress towards achieving the SDGs and indicates areas requiring faster progress. Estimates of indicators rely on the most up-to-date data from variety of official and nonofficial sources. In order to summarize levels and trends in country performance, the report calculates indices for each SDG with a scale from 0 to 100 (worst to best). A country's overall SDG Index score and its scores on individual SDGs can be interpreted as a percentage of optimal performance. The overall SDG index score ranges from a high of 84.7 in Sweden to a low of 38.5 in Central African Republic. The report's central chapter summarizes global and regional trends in index scores, and appendix tables present two-page summaries of levels and trends for SDG indicators for each country. Besides struggling with a range of methodological issues, the authors faced the difficult task of succinctly summarizing a very large set of data (115 SDGs indicators for 193 countries). Unfortunately, there are few general findings, because the degree of progress towards achieving the SDGs depends on (i) country/region, (ii) the specific SDG, and (iii) level or trend. On average, progress since 2015 has been fastest in low- and middle-income countries especially in East and South Asia. Africa scores low but showed significant improvements in a number of SDGs. OECD countries, which have on average the highest scores, made only limited progress. The report provides a valuable but rather brief summary of these regional differences. A second objective of SDR2020 is to review policy efforts to implement the SDGs. This assessment is based on information gathered in new expert and public opinion surveys to gauge political leadership in support of the SDGs at the country level. Results confirm that the SDGs framework is increasingly used at many national and international statistical institutes and other data providers. The adoption of the SDG framework by policy makers is growing but more limited. The report's clear exposition in graphs and tables and the many country and regional statistics will no doubt be appreciated by policy makers and researchers in national and international organizations. However, the value of the findings is somewhat limited by the lack of current data for many indicators. As the authors discovered, most estimates are not up to date and a substantial proportion of the data points available now even have a year of reference that predates the adoption of the SDGs. This diminishes the value of publishing country-level estimates on an annual basis, as indicators for many countries change little from one year to the next. The report was in preparation when the Covid-19 epidemic struck. A brief discussion of this huge new human and economic crisis is included, and the authors identify which SDGs will likely be most heavily affected. The epidemic will cause massive disruption of progress on the SDGs for years to come, but it was too early to assess this damage at the time of the publication of the report (July 2020).

In low-income and middle-income countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial implications for women's wellbeing. Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the gendered aspect of pandemics; however, addressing the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively and effectively requires a planetary health perspective that embraces systems thinking to inequalities. This Viewpoint is based on collective reflections from research done by the authors on COVID-19 responses by international and regional organisations, and national governments, in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa between June, 2020, and June, 2021. A range of international and regional actors have made important policy recommendations to address the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's health and wellbeing since the start of the pandemic. However, national-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been partial and inconsistent with regards to gender in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, largely failing to recognise the multiple drivers of gendered health inequalities. This Viewpoint proposes that addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in low-income and middle-income countries should adopt a systems thinking approach and be informed by the question of who is affected as opposed to who is infected. In adopting the systems thinking approach, responses will be more able to recognise and address the direct gendered effects of the pandemic and those that emerge indirectly through a combination of long-standing structural inequalities and gendered responses to the pandemic.

Global pandemic perspectives: public health, mental health, and lessons for the future

Can nature deliver on the sustainable development goals?

Carbon removals from nature restoration are no substitute for steep emission reductions

In this study, the authors aim to investigate the dynamic correlation and lead/lag relation between the progress of the countries on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and adaptation of Islamic finance. As the proxy of progress level on SDGs, SDG Index of the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) are used. To be able to determine the adaptation level of Islamic finance, Islamic Finance Adaptation (IFA) Index is introduced. The data set is formed with top eight countries according to Islamic finance assets and top eight countries according to the SDG Index for the period of 2012 and 2021. To assess the relation between progress level on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Index) and Islamic finance adaptation level (IFA Index), the Dynamic Conditional Correlation Model (DCC Model) of Engle and Sheppard and Geweke Feedback Measure of Geweke are used.

Scaling up urban infrastructure for physical activity in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond