The impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on a network of 276 international organizations     

《Global Environmental Change》2022

Global sustainability governance is marked by a highly fragmented system of distinct clusters of international organizations, along with states and other actors. Enhancing inter-organizational coordination and cooperation is thus often recognized as an important reform challenge in global sustainability governance. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by the United Nations in 2015, thus explicitly aim at advancing policy coherence and institutional integration among the myriad international institutions. Yet, have these goals been effective in this regard? We assess here the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals on the network structure of 276 international organizations in the period 2012–2019, that is, four years before and four years after the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals. The network structure was approximated by analyzing data from the websites of these 276 international organizations that were joined by more than 1.5 million hyperlinks, which we collected using a custom-made web crawler. Our findings are contrary to what is widely expected from the Sustainable Development Goals: we find that fragmentation has in fact increased after the Sustainable Development Goals came into effect. In addition, silos are increasing around the 17 SDGs as well as around the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.  相似文献   

Evaluating the benefits of national adaptation to reduce climate risks and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals     

《Global Environmental Change》2022

Scaling up national climate adaptation under the Paris Agreement is critical not only to reduce risk, but also to contribute to a nation’s development. Traditional adaptation assessments are aimed at evaluating adaptation to cost-effectively reduce risk and do not capture the far-reaching benefits of adaptation in the context of development and the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By grounding adaptation planning in an SDG vision, we propose and demonstrate a methodological process that for the first time allows national decision-makers to: i) quantify the adaptation that is needed to safeguard SDG target progress, and ii) evaluate strategies of stakeholder-driven adaptation options to meet those needs whilst delivering additional SDG target co-benefits. This methodological process is spatially applied to a national adaptation assessment in Ghana. In the face of the country’s risk from floods and landslides, this analysis identifies which energy and transport assets to prioritise in order to make the greatest contribution to safeguarding development progress. Three strategies (‘built’, ‘nature-based’, ‘combined SDG strategy’) were formulated through a multi-stakeholder partnership involving government, the private sector, and academia as a means to protect Ghana’s prioritised assets against climate risk. Evaluating these adaptation strategies in terms of their ability to deliver on SDG targets, we find that the combined SDG strategy maximises SDG co-benefits across 116 targets. The proposed methodological process for integrating SDG targets in adaptation assessments is transferable to other climate-vulnerable nations, and can provide decision-makers with spatially-explicit evidence for implementing sustainable adaptation in alignment with the global agendas.  相似文献