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Greater gains for Australia by tackling all SDGs but the last steps will be the most challenging

Nature Sustainability volume 2, pages 1041–1050 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) combine complex interlinkages, future uncertainty and transformational change. Recent studies highlight that trade-offs between SDG targets may undermine achievement of the goals. Significant gaps remain in scenario frameworks and modelling capabilities. We develop a novel approach nesting national SDG scenario modelling within the global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, selecting Australia as a use case. The integrated SDG–Australia model is used to project four alternative scenarios that adopt different development approaches. Although we find that Australia is off-track to achieve the SDGs by 2030, considerable progress is possible by altering Australia’s development trajectory. A ‘Sustainability Transition’ scenario comprising a coherent set of policies and investments delivers rapid and balanced progress of 70% towards SDG targets by 2030, well ahead of the business-as-usual scenario (40%). A focus on economic growth, social inclusion or green economy in isolation foregoes opportunities for greater gains. However, future uncertainty and cascading risks could undermine progress, and closing the gap to 100% SDG achievement will be very challenging. This will require a shift from ‘transition’ to ‘transformation’.

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Fig. 1: The nested approach used to develop national scenarios, assumptions and settings.
Fig. 2: Aggregate performance on the SDGs across all Australian scenarios.
Fig. 3: Performance of each scenario on economic, social and environmental SDG targets.
Fig. 4: The proportion of SDG targets assessed as ‘achieved’ under different scenarios.
Fig. 5: Sensitivity analysis of SDG performance results: boxplots of frequency distributions from Monte Carlo simulations.

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Data availability

The datasets collected and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

The iSDG simulation model can be made available from the Millennium Institute on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. West, H. Schandl and M. Stafford-Smith at the CSIRO for their informal advice, as well as the provision of data to support this study. We acknowledge the National Sustainable Development Council for their previous work in assessing Australia’s progress on the SDGs, which provided an important baseline for this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, PANGEA Centre, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Cameron Allen & Graciela Metternicht

  2. Sustainability Assessment Program, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Thomas Wiedmann

  3. ISA, School of Physics A28, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Thomas Wiedmann

  4. Millennium Institute, Washington, DC, USA

    Matteo Pedercini

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Contributions

C.A. led the research and undertook data collection, model calibration for iSDG–Australia, model adjustments, scenario development and simulations. M.P. developed the iSDG base model and provided advice and guidance data, model calibration and adjustment. G.M. and T.W. provided overall study supervision, advice and guidance regarding research framing, scenario development, methods and data sources. C.A. wrote the paper with inputs from G.M., T.W. and M.P.

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Correspondence to Cameron Allen.

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Allen, C., Metternicht, G., Wiedmann, T. et al. Greater gains for Australia by tackling all SDGs but the last steps will be the most challenging. Nat Sustain 2, 1041–1050 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0409-9

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