Examining the unsustainable relationship between SDG performance, ecological footprint and international spillovers.

For almost a decade, countries have been working to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet progress on the SDGs across countries, as well as across the 17 goals, has proven frustratingly slow. Even countries that have performed relatively well on the SDGs may have done so by causing negative externalities, such as environmental degradation, in other parts of the world. To determine if this is the case empirically, we developed and tested hypotheses concerning how a country's SDG performance is associated with such externalities. We then ran a regression to examine correlations between indices measuring SDG progress, ecological footprints and international spillovers. We found that SDG progress is positively correlated with increased ecological footprints and spillovers. The results indicate that SDG progress remains closely associated with conventional measures of economic growth, and that negative environmental and social impacts of internationally-sourced consumption represent behavioural and structural barriers to meaningful progress on sustainability.

System-level consequences of synergies and trade-offs between SDGs: quantitative analysis of interlinkage networks at country level.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a complex system of 17 goals and 169 individual targets whose interactions can be described in terms of co-benefits and trade-offs between policy actions. We analyse in detail target-by-target interlinkage networks established by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) SDG Interlinkages Tool. We discuss two quantitative measures of network structure; the leading eigenvector of the interlinkage networks ('eigencentrality') and a notion of hierarchy within the network motivated by the concept of trophic levels for species in food webs. We use three interlinkage matrices generated by IGES: the framework matrix which provides a generic network model of the interlinkages at the target level, and two country-specific matrices for Bangladesh and Indonesia that combine SDG indicator data with the generic framework matrix. Our results echo, and are confirmed by, similar work at the level of whole SDGs that has shown that SDGs 1-3 (ending poverty, and providing food security and healthcare) are much more likely to be achieved than the environmentally- related SDGs 13-15 concerned with climate action, life on land and life below water. Our results here provide a refinement in terms of specific targets within each of these SDGs. We find that not all targets within SDGs 1-3 are equally well-supported, and not all targets within SDGs 13-15 are equally at risk of not being achieved. Finally, we point to the recurring issue of data gaps that hinders our quantitative analysis, in particular for SDGs 5 (gender equality) and 13 (climate action) where the huge gaps in indicator data that mean the true nature of the interlinkages and importance of these two SDGs are not fully recognised. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01109-y.

Urban-rural linkages: effective solutions for achieving sustainable development in Ghana from an SDG interlinkage perspective.

Urbanization and concomitant challenges pose a great threat to sustainable development. Urban and rural development interacts through the flows of people, materials, energy, goods, capital, and information. Without building sound urban-rural linkages, achieving development in one area could compromise it in another area. Achieving sustainable development needs customized policy prioritization and implementation in both urban and rural areas. Much literature exists in the research field of urban-rural linkages, but little has been done via a comprehensive analysis from an interlinkage perspective in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sustainable Development Goal 11 on sustainable cities and several targets embedded under other Goals provides a good framework for analyzing the urban-rural linkages. This paper contributes to this novel research perspective using Ghana as a case. The study applied an integrated approach by combining the results from a solution-scanning exercise with an SDG interlinkage analysis to identify the challenges and priority solutions and assess the synergies and trade-offs of the identified solutions. It extends the conventional solution-scanning approach by further assessing the synergies and trade-offs of the solutions from an SDG interlinkage perspective. It also enables a more practical SDG interlinkage analysis through the contributions from the multi-stakeholder consultations conducted in Ghana. The analyses show that prioritizing gender inclusion (Goal 5) will positively affect many social and well-being outcomes, including poverty elimination (Goal 1), hunger reduction (Goal 2), health improvement (Goal 3) and access to quality education (Goal 4) and basic services, such as water (Goal 6). However, gender inclusion could have potential trade-offs in the agricultural sector (Goal 2) in the case that women who dominate agricultural value chains could move to work in other sectors. Lack of proper infrastructure (Goal 9), such as transport, will hinder wide gender inclusion. An integrated approach that considers both the synergies and trade-offs of relevant solutions is critical for effective policymaking, specifically in developing countries.