All these goals are interconnected, and there are many ways that microbial technologies have impacted each of them. ...the examples of microbial technologies that may impact SDG that I include in this ‘Burning Questions’ editorial do not wish to be exhaustive, but to highlight the enormous potential of microbial biotechnology. Human population is increasing at a very high rate, and it increased 2.5 times from 1960 to 2020 reaching 8 billion people on November 15, 2022, so land for agriculture and farming is increasingly limited. ...new strategies should be developed for food production that optimizes land productivity, without harming the environment, and new sources of nutrients should be made available. ...making symbiotic nitrogen fixation available to non-legume crops would represent a major breaking point in agriculture and in the possibility of ending hunger in the world. The advantage of biosurfactants over chemically synthetized surfactants that are widely used in practically all industrial fields is that they are non-toxic and biodegradable and show unexpected activities that are useful in many biotechnology areas (Kossmann et al., 2023, for example). ...the use of these bioactive compounds instead of their chemically synthetized counterparts will considerably reduce pollution and will benefit different industrial areas.