{"id":7420,"date":"2019-04-04T09:17:32","date_gmt":"2019-04-04T09:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7420"},"modified":"2019-04-04T09:17:32","modified_gmt":"2019-04-04T09:17:32","slug":"climate-breakdown-the-economy-and-sdgs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/04\/04\/climate-breakdown-the-economy-and-sdgs\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate breakdown, the economy and SDGs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today's text is a message sent to the SHED-SHARE Maillist by two academic colleagues: Steve Martin <\/em>& Stephen Sterling<\/em>. As far as I can see it stimulated little discussion.<\/p>\n

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Colleagues,<\/p>\n

As many of us know our unsustainable lifestyles and commitment to perpetual economic growth has become the major driver of climate change on Earth.<\/p>\n

Encouragingly, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out a new roadmap for our future that in principle seeks to align the economy with the Earth\u2019s life support systems.<\/p>\n

We have been very impressed by a recent, authoritative report<\/a> published in October 2018 by the Stockholm Resilience Centre which has systematically explored the relationship between the 3 environmental goals (SDG 13, 14 and 15) and the 11 socio-economic goals (SDG1-11) and how they might interact in relation to a number of future scenarios.<\/p>\n

This report clearly articulates that any successes in reaching the eleven social and economic goals, if done based on conventional growth policies, <\/em>would make it virtually impossible to reduce the speed of global warming or to stop overfishing in the oceans or to stop land degradation, let alone to halt biodiversity loss.<\/p>\n

The report confirms that meeting the SDGs in an integrated fashion based on conventional growth policies is not possible. \u00a0By accelerating growth, an increasing number of the socio-economic goals may be reached but it will occur at the expense of the environmental SDGs and push planetary boundaries into high-risk zones. \u00a0In other words, assuming no major changes in the way economic growth is defined and pursued, humanity would be confronted with massive trade-offs between the socio-economic and the environmental SDGs. \u00a0The only way we will meet most of the goals by 2030 is one built on transformational change starting now. \u00a0According to the report, such a pathway rests on at least five transformational actions with systems-wide effects on the SDGs:<\/p>\n