Six Transformations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Blog Post

Aug 30, 2019

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change call for deep transformations in every country that require complementary actions by governments, civil society, science, and business. Yet stakeholders lack a shared understanding of how the 17 SDGs can be operationalized. Drawing on earlier work by The World in 2050 initiative, we introduce six SDG Transformations as modular building-blocks of SDG achievement:

Education, Gender, and Inequality;
Health, Wellbeing, and Demography;
Energy Decarbonisation and Sustainable Industry;
Sustainable Food, Land, Water, and Oceans;
Sustainable Cities and Communities; and
Digital Revolution for Sustainable Development.

Each Transformation identifies priority investments and regulatory challenges calling for actions by well-defined parts of government working with business and civil society. Transformations may therefore be operationalised within the structures of government while respecting the strong interdependencies across the 17 SDGs. The paper also outlines an action agenda for science to provide the knowledge required for designing, implementing, and monitoring the SDG Transformations.

Other Resources:

Full paper (link does not allow for printing), first published in Nature Sustainability
Press Release: Six Transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals lays out integrated framework for implementing the SDGs
A short blog on the Nature community page describes the motivation for the paper.

Download working paper

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