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The longer the world delays implementing ambitious climate policy, and the fewer technologies it is willing to use, the more it lowers the prospects of reaching the other UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). This was the finding of a new study from IIASA and the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). 

“The UN sustainable development goals form a complex structure. Anyone seeking to interfere in any which way should be aware of the complicated mechanism,” says Christoph von Stechow from the MCC, the leader of the study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. In other words, if we want to achieve all the SDGs at once, we have to understand how our decisions today affect the likelihood of reaching them. 

The seventeen SDGs were adopted in 2015 by all 193 countries of the United Nations and are intended to be reached by 2030. Based on the latest IPCC report, the researchers have examined, for the first time, how climate change mitigation efforts would influence other sustainable energy objectives, such as access to affordable and clean energy, less ocean acidification, and reduced air pollution. Based on existing scenarios that keep global mean temperature rise below 2°C, the scientists calculated the impacts on various sustainability risks across different models. 

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