DISCOVER

THE INDIVISIBLE NATURE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through biodiversity

 by  Nature for Life

Sustainable Development Goals 

In 2015, the world agreed to an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets that together provide a road map for people, the planet, prosperity, peace and partnerships. The preamble to the SDGs recognizes the tenet of indivisibility - that no goal can be achieved at the expense of another, that interlinkages and integration between the goals are essential to success. One aspect of indivisibility is that we cannot achieve economic prosperity at the expense of the environment; we must learn to decouple economic growth from the loss and degradation of biodiversity and ecosystems.

The following interactive SDG wheel analyzes the relevancy of nature to each SDG target. Drawing from the work of Singh et al. (2017) on co-benefits and trade-offs among SDGs, and from the work of Nilsson et al. (2016) on the interactions between SDGs, this graphic categorizes the relationship between nature and each SDG target. The relevancy of nature to each SDG target has been categorized as following:

Indivisible:
Biodiversity itself is an indivisible foundation for achieving the target.		 Dependent:
Biodiversity-related actions directly help to achieve the target.
Co-beneficial:
Biodiversity and/or biodiversity actions provide important co-benefits to achieving some or all aspects of the target, but are not essential, or even tangential, to fulfilling the target.		 Biodiversity-independent:neither biodiversity itself, nor biodiversity-related actions, have any impact on achieving the target.

Click on each target to read analysis