•Before the pandemic progress toward some SDGs was lacking.•Post-pandemic here may be less financing for attaining the SDGs.•Affordable policies that meet several SDGs simultaneously are ...needed.•Fossil fuel and irrigation subsidy swaps to end water and energy poverty.•Tropical carbon tax to fund natural climate solutions.
Developing countries are highly vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to the lack of international support for ensuring progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet the mounting financial burden faced by all countries means that additional support is unlikely to be forthcoming in the near future. It is critical that developing countries find innovative policy mechanisms to achieve sustainability and development aims in a cost-effective manner. This requires identifying affordable policies that can yield immediate progress towards several SDGs together and aligns economic incentives for longer term sustainable development. We identify three policies that meet these criteria: a fossil fuel subsidy swap to fund clean energy investments and dissemination of renewable energy in rural areas; reallocating irrigation subsidies to improve water supply, sanitation and wastewater infrastructure; and a tropical carbon tax, which is a levy on fossil fuels that funds natural climate solutions. Such innovative and cost-effective policy mechanisms do not require substantial external support, and they foster greater progress towards achieving the SDGs in poorer economies.
•Tradeoffs and complementarities among SDGs clearly exist.•We develop an approach to estimating these SDG interactions.•We apply the approach globally and to low-income countries for 2000–2016.•The ...net gain of reducing poverty doubles globally but falls for poor economies.•Analyzing such interactions helps policy makers prioritize SDGs.
Assessment of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has largely focused on formulating appropriate targets and indicators for each goal. Much less attention has been devoted to estimating possible tradeoffs and complementarities in attaining the various SDGs. Yet such tradeoffs and complementarities clearly exist. We develop an analytical model to estimate the welfare effects of progress in attaining one SDG while accounting for interactions in achieving other SDGs. We assess quantitatively progress in the SDGs over 2000–2016 at the global level and for low-income countries, using a representative indicator for each goal. We then estimate the welfare changes for improvements in No Poverty (SDG1) net of any welfare gains and losses in attaining each of the remaining 16 goals. For the world, we estimate the per capita welfare change of reductions in 2000–2016 poverty rates net of any gains or losses in attaining each of the remaining 16 goals is $12,737 per capita. This is more than double the welfare change of $5671 per person for poverty reduction alone from 2000 to 2016. However, once interactions with other SDGs are taken into account, the net welfare change for poverty reduction in poor economies from 2000 to 2016 is $244 per person, which is almost 20% lower than the welfare estimate of $299 per capita of poverty reduction on its own. Such an analysis helps policy makers prioritize improvements towards one goal or set of goals, and show explicitly the net gains and losses for achieving one goal while impacting others. For example, over 2000–2016 the world may have come closer to attaining the No Poverty goal, but at the expense of other critical SDGs, especially those associated with the environment. This research has important implications for achieving sustainability through pursuit of the SDGs.
The authors explore the link between the systems approach to sustainability and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were formally adopted by the UN in 2015. The systems approach ...depicts sustainable development as the intersection of the goals attributed to three interlinked systems: environmental (or ecological), economic and social. The authors illustrate how each of the 17 SDGs can be characterized as a goal primarily attributed either to the environmental, economic or social system, and as suggested by the systems approach, there may be important tradeoffs in attempting to attain all these goals simultaneously. By adopting standard methods of the theory of choice and welfare under imposed quantities, the authors show that is possible to measure the welfare effects of an increase in the indicator level for one SDG by identifying the tradeoffs that occur with achieving another goal. They present a quantitative assessment of current progress and tradeoffs among the 17 SDGs, using a representative indicator for each goal. They then conduct a preliminary welfare analysis of these tradeoffs through employing the approach developed in this paper. Although this analysis focuses on the potential tradeoffs among SDGs, the approach could also be applied to show complementarities, or 'win-wins', in simultaneous progress among two or more SDGs. Such an analysis can help in the design of appropriate policy interventions to achieve specific SDGs, minimizing the potentially negative knock-on effects on some goals whilst capitalizing on the positive win-win impacts on other SDGs.
Building on the contributions of Mather and others, this paper offers an approach for developing a more comprehensive theory of the forest transition. We argue that long-run changes in forest cover ...in a country or region cannot be separated from the overall pattern of land use changes. Moreover, this pattern is determined by relative land values; forest cover changes over time as the value of one land use relative to the value of its competing use changes over time. However, the actual values that are used to allocate land may be far from optimal; that is, the presence of market, policy and institutional failures can distort economic and political incentives that can lead to bias in favour of one type of land use over the other, and may ultimately explain why a forest transition may be delayed unnecessarily in some countries and regions.
Earth systems science maintains that there are nine “planetary boundaries” that demarcate a sustainable, safe operating space for humankind for essential global sinks and resources. Respecting these ...planetary boundaries represents the “strong sustainability” perspective in economics, which argues that some natural capital may not be substituted and are inviolate. In addition, the safe operating space defined by these boundaries can be considered a depletable stock. We show that standard tools of natural resource economics for an exhaustible resource can thus be applied, which has implications for optimal use, price paths, technological innovation, and stock externalities. These consequences in turn affect the choice of policies that may be adopted to manage and allocate the safe operating space available for humankind.
Whether environmental impacts, natural capital depreciation, and effective governance have impacted progress in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) to achieving the 17 Sustainable ...Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN Agenda 2030 has become a significant policy topic. We determine estimates of the changes in net welfare that indicate progress over 2000–2019 in terms of meeting the 17 SDGs for 99 EMDEs. We compare these estimates with the environmental impacts associated with SDGs 11–15, natural resource depletion as a share of national income, and average institutional quality. Net SDG welfare gains over 2000–2019 were often accompanied by adverse environmental impacts, natural capital depletion, and poor-quality institutions. This is especially the case for low- and lower-middle-income economies. Higher net SDG welfare gains are correlated with reduced losses associated with SDGS 11–15, and larger welfare gains from attaining SDG 1 No Poverty are associated with better governance. These results suggest that long-term progress towards the SDGs in EMDEs hinges on improved management of natural capital and the environment, as well as more effective governance. Three policies can be implemented to achieve these objectives without additional financing or imposing fiscal burdens: fossil fuel subsidy swaps, tropical carbon taxes, and improved management and distribution of resource revenues.
How to pay for saving biodiversity Barbier, Edward B; Burgess, Joanne C; Dean, Thomas J
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
2018-May-04, 2018-05-04, 20180504, Letnik:
360, Številka:
6388
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Can private sector involvement in a global agreement help to conserve global biodiversity?
The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was one of the first international environmental ...agreements negotiated. In the same year, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for funding biodiversity conservation in developing countries was launched. Yet 25 years later, biological populations and diversity continue to decline both on land (
1
) and in the oceans (
2
). The main reasons are chronic underfunding of global biodiversity conservation; the lack of incentives for global cooperation; and the failure to control habitat conversion, resource overexploitation, species invasions, and other drivers of biodiversity loss. Dinerstein
et al.
recently called for a global deal, complementing the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, for conserving half of the terrestrial realm for biodiversity by 2050 (
3
). Here, we explore how such a deal might be implemented to overcome the funding problem in biodiversity protection.
Whether institutional quality and governance help or hinder progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of UN Agenda 2030 is an important issue to consider. These fundamental social ...structures are generally under-represented among the SDGs, but institutional quality and governance often have an important role in supporting or constraining efforts to achieve sustainable development. We compare estimates of the changes in net welfare that reflect progress towards the 17 SDGs over 2000–2018 with two institutional quality and governance indicators over the same period. We do this at the world level, for the group of low-income countries and for nine representative developing countries. We utilize the Worldwide Governance Indicators and OECD’s Country Risk Classification as our two institutional quality and governance measures. We find that SDG welfare gains are somewhat correlated with institutional quality and highly correlated with lower country risk. These results suggest that good governance and institutional effectiveness are associated with long-run development and sustainability success. Long-term progress towards the SDGs may hinge on improved institutional quality and reduced country risk.
Invasive lionfish (Pterois volitans, Pterois miles), introduced to Florida in the 1980s, colonized coral reef ecosystems in the western Atlantic and have been documented beyond recreational diving ...depths. In addition to threatening coral reef ecosystems, invasive lionfish have been linked to economic damage in the form of reduced native fish yields for local fishers and high management costs incurred in the physical removal of lionfish.
While few examples exist of successful management of marine invasive species, studies show that lionfish removal can mitigate their harmful impacts. One promising market‐based approach that offers benefits to both human livelihoods and marine ecosystems is increasing the demand for the consumption of lionfish. This study focuses on Florida's consumptive lionfish market and fills a gap in understanding of the lionfish supply chain for Florida's restaurant industry.
Twenty culinary professionals in Florida were interviewed to determine their perceptions of barriers and opportunities for increasing their use of lionfish. The most commonly identified barriers were price and consistency of supply, while the most prominent opportunities were improved awareness and culinary potential. Conservation managers, culinary professionals and policymakers should leverage these findings to facilitate opportunities, address barriers and promote public education about invasive lionfish and their impacts.
Although national commitments to the Paris Climate Accord have waned, carbon mitigation by sub-national entities is on the rise globally. We examine the effectiveness of sub-national jurisdictions ...(e.g., states, provinces, cities) in collectively enacting greenhouse gas abatement strategies. We develop a simple model to explore the conditions under which an agreement among sub-national jurisdictions within a country may lead to substantial carbon abatement relative to a national policy determined through majority rule. We find that, in the absence of a functional national policy response, a coordinated sub-national agreement can generate meaningful abatement. This could form an important stopgap measure in the absence of better alternatives.
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