Multiple pathways towards sustainable development goals and climate targets

Abstract

The UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate target require a holistic transformation towards human well-being within planetary boundaries. However, there are growing debates on how to best pursue these targets. Proposed transformation strategies include market- and technology-driven green-growth, shifting towards a sufficiency-oriented post-growth economy, and a transformation driven primarily by strong government action. Here we quantify three alternative sustainable development pathways (SDPs), Economy-driven Innovation, Resilient Communities, and Managing the Global Commons, that reflect these different societal strategies. We compare the quantifications from two integrated assessment models and two sectoral models of the buildings and materials sectors across a broad set of indicators for sustainable development and climate action. Our global multi-scenario and multi-model analysis shows that all three SDPs enable substantial progress towards the human development goals of the SDGs. They simultaneously limit global warming and prevent further environmental degradation, with the sufficiency-oriented Resilient Communities scenario showing the lowest peak warming and lowest reliance on carbon dioxide removal as well as the largest improvements in biodiversity intactness. The SDPs also alleviate the concerns about the biogeophysical and technological feasibility of narrowly-focused climate change mitigation scenarios. However, the shifts in energy and food consumption patterns assumed in the SDPs, ranging from moderate in Economy-driven Innovation to very ambitious in Resilient Communities, also lead to increased challenges regarding socio-cultural feasibility.