• Michael Obersteiner, Brian Walsh, Stefan Frank, Petr Havlík, Matthew Cantele, Junguo Liu, Amanda Palazzo, Mario Herrero, Yonglong Lu, Aline Mosnier, Hugo Valin, Keywan Riahi, Florian Kraxner, Steffen Fritz, and Detlef van Vuuren.
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Ecosystem Services and Management Program, Schlossplatz 1, A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria.
• Sci Adv. 2016 Sep 1; 2 (9): e1501499.

AbstractThe 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for a comprehensive new approach to development rooted in planetary boundaries, equity, and inclusivity. The wide scope of the SDGs will necessitate unprecedented integration of siloed policy portfolios to work at international, regional, and national levels toward multiple goals and mitigate the conflicts that arise from competing resource demands. In this analysis, we adopt a comprehensive modeling approach to understand how coherent policy combinations can manage trade-offs among environmental conservation initiatives and food prices. Our scenario results indicate that SDG strategies constructed around Sustainable Consumption and Production policies can minimize problem-shifting, which has long placed global development and conservation agendas at odds. We conclude that Sustainable Consumption and Production policies (goal 12) are most effective at minimizing trade-offs and argue for their centrality to the formulation of coherent SDG strategies. We also find that alternative socioeconomic futures-mainly, population and economic growth pathways-generate smaller impacts on the eventual achievement of land resource-related SDGs than do resource-use and management policies. We expect that this and future systems analyses will allow policy-makers to negotiate trade-offs and exploit synergies as they assemble sustainable development strategies equal in scope to the ambition of the SDGs.

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