Strategies to reach global sustainability should take better account of ecosystem services

Highlights

• We designed a new framework to classify countries according to their trajectory concerning the 2030 Agenda.

• There are abysmal differences in the sustainability performance among countries.

• There are critical trade-offs between goals, and SDG 12 presents the most trade-offs.

• Current efforts are conducting trajectories of local sustainability rather than towards global sustainability.

• The existing trade-offs between socioeconomic and ‘green’ SDGs suggest that ES are not incorporated into sustainability policies.

Abstract

Strategies for establishing priorities for the sustainability agenda by addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are prominent in the scientific literature. Some studies have suggested that sustainability will emerge from different backgrounds, such as through biosphere or societal transformations, whereas other approaches have searched for potential synergies and trade-offs between SDGs. Here, we analysed the main SDG database to investigate the caveats and cooperation opportunities to turn initiatives from local to global sustainability. We established an innovative conceptual framework to set up different sustainability trends for all SDGs and classified countries accordingly. We revealed that despite the significant advance in the last years, the sustainability agenda is still based on national rather than global performance. Consequently, the current efforts are promoting local sustainability trends with great spillover among countries. ‘Green’ SDGs 14 and 15 often had trade-offs or are uncoupled of social and economic SDGs. It suggests that the role ecosystem services play in connecting biodiversity and human wellbeing is not well incorporated into policies and practices. We argue that the world's shift towards global sustainability will depend strongly on cooperation among countries, strengthen existing synergies between SDGs and reduce negative externalities to other specific agendas.

Introduction

In 2015, the United Nations established the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which comprises 17 goals and 169 targets associated with economic, environmental, and social pillars (Biggeri et al., 2019, Pedercini et al., 2019). The 2030 Agenda was agreed upon by 195 countries, and the world now has ten years to achieve the ambitious goal of becoming sustainable (Pradhan, 2019). Although this agenda is global, each country has specific potentialities and faces specific hurdles that depend on its present status in each aspect of the sustainability agenda and on the sociopolitical engagement that determines the velocity of such transformation (Lusseau and Mancini, 2019). Given the multiplicity of goals and targets, priority setting is a key strategic step in promoting synergies and minimising trade-offs (Sachs et al., 2017).

Effectively prioritising actions towards sustainability requires an understanding of the current missteps and the directions being taken. Actual challenges suggest that sustainability, once reached, depends on a continuous effort to maintain optimal performance and ensure the reduction of the great spillover among nations (Sachs et al., 2020). Although the 2030 Agenda emerges as a global agreement that would require cooperation, current efforts are leading to competition among countries, reducing the importance of the premise of leaving no one behind (Sachs et al., 2020). Consequently, it can promote a set of trade-offs among goals at national and global scales. Despite the obvious relevance of looking at the sustainability agenda's behaviour globally, most sustainability studies focus on the interaction between goals but do not explain the mechanisms behind potential antagonisms and how that compromises global sustainability. For instance, ‘green’ SDGs related to marine and continental biodiversity (14 and 15, respectively) often present trade-offs with social or economic goals, neglecting ecosystem services' potential role in the 2030 Agenda (Scherer et al., 2018, Wood et al., 2018). However, the mechanisms that drive such antagonisms and how they can compromise to reach sustainability at the global level are less investigated.

In this study, we evaluated the behaviour of and interaction between the SDGs and tested the current sustainability trends globally. We used the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) database, the main global effort to synthesise SDG data (Sachs et al., 2017, Xu et al., 2020). Our innovative approach involved calculating sustainability performance, synergies, and trade-offs among SDGs based on the temporal behaviour (2017–2019) of the SDG Index developed by SDSN. For that, we established five potential scenarios that indicate countries’ sustainability trajectories (stable, emerging, unstable, submerging, and collapse) based on the SDG Index (Fig. 1). The difference between scenarios is determined by combining the temporal behaviour and the present condition of the SDG Index for each country. This model enables a determination of (i) the present status of each country concerning all SDGs and (ii) whether the planet is heading towards local or global sustainability (i.e., whether sustainability is more likely to be achieved in specific countries rather than collectively by all). We argue that in order to speed up global sustainability, countries with better status should cooperate with countries presenting critical values at present or a decreasing trajectory. Finally, we pay particular attention to the trends related to the ‘green’ SDGs 14 and 15 and their importance to promote sustainability globally.