6 July 2015: The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) International Resource Panel (IRP) has published a report warning that “unless prudent natural resources management becomes an integral part of policy packages,” the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will not achieve their purpose of ending extreme poverty by 2030. The report, ‘Policy Coherence of the Sustainable Development Goals: A Natural Resource Perspective,’ contends that sustainable prosperity for current and future generations requires maintaining and restoring ecosystem health.
The report says that policies to achieve the SDGs must be designed and implemented in an integrated manner in order to maximize progress towards achieving all the goals, and analyzes the interlinkages, synergies and trade-offs among the natural resource-related SDGs that must be considered when formulating policies for their implementation. The report includes sections on: challenges to achieving the SDGs; understanding synergies, conflicts and trade-offs; and seeking synergies and avoiding trade-offs.
Addressing the report’s findings, UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said that achieving the SDGs will require fundamental shifts in the way “in which humanity views the natural environment in relation to human development,” and highlighted opportunities for synergies between goals that would help ensure progress towards one goal strengthens the achievement of others.
The report’s findings contend that if the energy, food security and climate change SDGs are addressed by sectoral polices, potential trade-offs will occur between food systems, biodiversity, climate mitigation, nutrient pollution and freshwater use. For example, progress towards SDGs related to food security, energy production, and water and sanitation all depend on the very same land systems that are subject to conservation strategies aimed at maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Thus, the SDGs should be tackled as “an integrated, coordinated package,” understanding the different goals, their resource requirements, managing synergies and mitigating trade-offs. In addition, the report suggests combining policies with sustainable consumption and production measures, and ensuring environmental and social safeguards.
In adopting and implementing the SDGs, the report specifically recommends that the international community: maintain a sustainable resource management perspective that recognizes the importance of restoration, conservation, efficiency and decoupling strategies for achieving the SDGs; promote synergies and avoid environment-development trade-offs among the SDGs through analyzing natural resource and socioeconomic system interactions; create coherence and coordination among policy strategies for achieving multiple SDGs to achieve co-benefits and avoid counterproductive results; adopt consumption patterns and production systems that contribute to human well-being without putting unsustainable pressures on the environment and resources; and build national capacities for integrated policy assessment, technological innovation and financial mobilization to enable countries to formulate and implement integrated strategies.
IRP consists of more than 30 experts and scientists and over 30 national governments, is hosted by UNEP’s Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (DTIE). It was established in 2007 to provide policy-relevant scientific assessments to governments and other stakeholders on the efficient and effective use of natural resources. [Publication: Policy Coherence of the Sustainable Development Goals: A Natural Resource Perspective] [UNEP Press Release] [UNEP Knowledge Repository]