The contradiction of the sustainable development goals: Growth versus ecology on a finite planet (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sustainability Science, 2020
The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015, succeeding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While the MDGs focused on improving well-being in the developing world, the 17 SDGs address all countries and aim at reconciling economic and social with ecological goals. We adopt a social ecology perspective and critically reflect on the SDGs' potential for monitoring, supporting, and bringing about a transformation towards sustainability. Starting from a literature review on the SDGs, we link empirical findings from social ecology with analyses of SDG targets and indicators. First, we find that the SDGs fail to monitor absolute trends in resource use and thus prioritize economic growth over ecological integrity. Second, we discuss the contradictions between economic growth and sustainable resource use in early and late stages of industrialization processes and show that they are responsible for important trade-offs among SDG targets. Third, we analyze the transformative potential of the SDGs with a focus on the actors and institutions addressed to bring about transformative change. We find that the SDGs rely mainly on those institutions responsible for unsustainable resource use, and partly propose measures that even reinforce current trends towards less sustainability. Despite ascertaining limited transformative potential to the SDGs from an analytical perspective, we conclude by stressing the strategic relevance of the SDGs for visions, research, and practices of statt towards transformative change towards sustainability.
The Challenge of Sustainable Development and the Imperative of Green and Inclusive Economic Growth
The greatest challenge of the century is to meet the needs of current and future generations, of a large and growing world population, while at the same time ensuring the sustainability of the natural environment. The current development model places unsustainable pressures on the natural resources—forests, land, water and the atmosphere—and causes an increasing frequency and intensity of natural and humanitarian disasters. The paper agrees with increasing evidence that business-as-usual is not an option, but it takes issues with many of the suggested policy responses. Human wellbeing is inseparably linked to economic growth, and economic growth inevitably has environmental implications. While it is impossible to decouple these linkages, countries can promote more sustainable development pathways by altering these linkages. To this end, they have three principle policy levers, which will need to complement each other: Efforts to promote more inclusive economic growth, efforts to increase resource-efficiency, and efforts to address and harness demographic changes. The paper has important implications for the discussions on sustainable development goals and the post-2015 development agenda, which takes place at the United Nations.
Linking the Environment, SDGs and Economic Growth: Are We Doing Enough
QUEST, 2021
"One thing leads to the other. Deforestation leads to climate change, which leads to ecosystem losses, which negatively impacts our livelihoods-it's a vicious cycle"this is the famous quote by the Supermodel and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, Gisele Bundchen. Nowadays, one of the most topical issues that have received extensive attention in Environmental and Development Economics centers on what Bundchen was talking about. Attempts at demystifying Bundchen's statements have spawned an avalanche of policy positions, pronouncements and discussions. Motivated by the dynamic interaction between the environment, SDGs and the economy, this paper systematically explores literature. Results indicate that the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is valid in most parts of the world. Amongst other policy prescriptions, the study recommends the adoption of "green growth" if the environment is to be conserved for current and future generations across the globe amid the visible threats of climate change.
2020
The United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015are rightly celebrated as a major achievement: an agreement between nationson a comprehensive plan to tackle worldwide social and environmental crises.However, they rely on elements that are likely to undermine their success, andon trade-offs where some SDGs will have to be sacrificed to achieve others.Of particular concern is the injunction to foster economic growth, defined asgrowth in per capita gross domestic product (GDP).The SDGs include specific goals for conservation, protection and restorationof land, sea and climate for the first time. A fourth goal (SDG12), ‘sustainableconsumption and production patterns’, also implies environmental limits.These four goals are an advance on the 2001 Millennium Development Goalswhich, though they talked of ‘sustainable development’ in general terms,otherwise ignored the Earth system that supports all life, including human life.
Ecological Economics, 2020
When the Human Development Index (HDI) was introduced in the 1990s, it was an important step toward a more sensible measure of progress, one defined less by GDP growth and more by social goals. But the limitations of HDI have become clear in the 21 st century, given a growing crisis of climate change and ecological breakdown. HDI pays no attention to ecology, and retains an emphasis on high levels of income that-given strong correlations between income and ecological impact-violates sustainability principles. The countries that score highest on the HDI also contribute most, in per capita terms, to climate change and other forms of ecological breakdown. In this sense, HDI promotes a model of development that is empirically incompatible with ecological stability, and impossible to universalize. In this paper I propose an alternative index that corrects for these problems: the Sustainable Development Index (SDI). The SDI retains the base formula of the HDI but places a sufficiency threshold on per capita income, and divides by two key indicators of ecological impact: CO2 emissions and material footprint, both calculated in per capita consumption-based terms and rendered vis-à-vis planetary boundaries. The SDI is an indicator of strong sustainability that measures nations' ecological efficiency in delivering human development.
Heading towards an unsustainable world: some of the implications of not achieving the SDGs
Discover Sustainability
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were conceived at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 (Rio + 20), and adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015. They are part of a larger framework, namely the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Since then, many countries round the world have been engaging in respect of their implementation. The slow progress seen in the implementation of the SDGs, is in contrast with the many negative implications of not implementing them. This paper outlines the relevance of the SDGs, the barriers currently seen in respect of their implementation and outlines what is at stake, if they are not duly implemented. To accomplish this, a thorough literature review of contributions published in the field of SDGs in English between the years 2012–2020 was performed.