External publications

Integrative approaches to the environmental and socio-economic SDGs

Iacobuţă , Gabriela Ileana / Heleen van Soest / Subhes Bhattacharyya
External Publications (2024)

in: Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, 21 (1), article 2397609

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1943815X.2024.2397609
Open access

Recognizing the urgent need for ambitious, coordinated and coherent action worldwide, UN Member States unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 related ambitious targets (United Nations). This global agenda aims to act as a “plan of action for people, planet and prosperity” (Preamble) and to strengthen peace and partnerships. As such, the SDGs address all major social, economic and environmental areas of development, e.g. ensuring food security, reducing inequalities, combating climate change, and enabling sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Nonetheless, while each SDG focuses on one specific area, the agenda emphasizes the intricate interlinkages between these and calls for a policy-coherent approach in implementation (Target 17.14 “Enhance policy coherence for sustainable development”). This editorial presents the article collection entitled “Integrative approaches to the environmental and socio-economic SDGs” published in the Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences. The aim of this article collection is to push the knowledge boundary for dealing with global challenges through the use of integrative and systems-oriented thinking applied at different spatial dimensions (local, national and international). It is interested in tools and approaches, as well as governance and policy environments required to support the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This collection contains seven contributions that have been rigorously reviewed, revised and published following the journal’s review procedures. These contributions cover a range of SDG dimensions, starting from an assessment of the integration of all SDGs and moving to a focus on climate change measures’ interactions with all other SDGs and further in-depth assessments of interactions with key SDG areas, in particular, biodiversity, water, inequalities and energy. Moreover, the articles in this article collection use various methods, such as Integrated Assessment Models, country case studies, and index development, and have different spatial scopes (Global, Brazil, China, Germany, India, and South Africa). In this editorial, we briefly review each of these papers.