Analyzing sustainable development: systems-based methods and modeling tools for the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a 15-year roadmap for global sustainable development with the ultimate goal of eradicating extreme poverty. Devised through political consensus, as opposed to academic... [ view full abstract ]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a 15-year roadmap for global sustainable development with the ultimate goal of eradicating extreme poverty. Devised through political consensus, as opposed to academic consensus, the SDGs were formulated as a list of 17 goals and 169 targets with limited consideration for their interactions. Since their inception, there has been an increasing interest in formulating and quantifying these interactions and addressing the 17 goals in an integrated manner. This is a challenging and laborious task due to the underlying complex socioeconomic, political, and environmental issues at play among each goal and their associated targets. This paper belongs to a group of recent contributions interested in utilizing soft- and hard-systems approaches to model the SDGs in an integrated manner. Two types of analyses are presented: the cross-impact analysis (soft approach) and system dynamics (hard approach). Both approaches consider all potential interactions among the SDGs. The cross-impact analysis is useful for a static representation of the SDGs and can be carried out with relative ease; it provides a good overview of the SDG as a complete system. System dynamic models by their very nature change with time and can model long-term interactions and trends and identify emergent patterns and leverage points; they require more effort to construct but can be used to produce highly-informative scenarios and what-if analyses. Models illustrating the application of these two approaches to the SDGs are also presented with an accompanying user-friendly, web-based interface tool designed for anyone interested in exploring trade-offs and synergies among the SDGs. This tool will be updated constantly and should be of particular interest to decision and policy makers and those actually responsible for implementing the SDGs at the country-level.