13 December 2018 : The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) has highlighted the linkages between the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and climate change in a policy brief titled, ‘The Sustainable Development Goals Viewed through a Climate Lens.’ The publication highlights the potential for policy coherence in the implementation of the SDGs and nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of 164 countries.

The policy brief is based on findings from the NDC-SDG Connections Tool, developed by the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) and SEI, which analyzes connections between climate change and the SDGs by identifying synergies. The tool derives activities from countries’ NDCs into categories of climate action, and links these with SDG targets.

The complexity of the connections between climate change and the SDGs is a challenge for conventional structures and processes.

The authors identify SDG themes with the strongest climate synergies such as energy, agriculture, water, resilience, resource efficiency, disaster risk reduction (DRR), and infrastructure. The document notes that different ministerial departments are responsible for implementing the NDCs and SDGs, and highlights that “too often they work in silos, and the complexity of the connections between climate change and the SDGs is a challenge for conventional structures and processes of decision-making.”

The authors note that new approaches at the global, national and sub-national levels that integrate horizontal and vertical decision making and increase policy coherence are essential to avoid implementation inefficiencies and to assist in achieving desired outcomes.

The brief highlights trade-offs and gaps between climate action and sustainable development arising from implementation, which include trade-offs in the global stocktake (GST) process under the Paris Agreement on climate change and financing processes. To minimize trade-offs, the authors recommend that countries that have not yet embarked on implementing the SDGs design their future national sustainable development strategies in a way that takes account of and complements their existing NDCs by focusing on issues that have not been addressed in them. They also recommend that countries take into account existing national sustainable development strategies and their synergistic potential in their future NDCs. [Publication: The Sustainable Development Goals Viewed through a Climate Lens] [NDC-SDG Connections Tool]