Multi-objective Research on Meeting Sustainable Development Goals
Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were laid out at the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 as a blueprint to build a better world. The 17 Goals, designated for completion by 2030, are understood to go hand-in-hand, i.e., that responsible consumption and production (Goal 12) must overlap with the conservation of life on land (Goal 15) and below the water (Goal 14). However, academic research has historically been siloed and restricted by departmental boundaries. To more holistically address sustainable development challenges, increasingly interdisciplinary work involving human-natural interconnections is needed. In this work, we scraped over 100,000 articles related to sustainable development from the Web of Science database and performed a synonym analysis on the UN's SDGs and related targets to assess the multi-objective emphasis of each research article. In order to elucidate the impact of multi-SDG research on progress exhibited across countries based on their World Bank Sustainable Indicators, we explored the correlation between the multi-objective emphasis and Sustainable Indicators. Our results suggest that research involving multiple human-natural connections yields significantly greater improvement across all SDGs; therefore making it more likely to reach SDG targets. Ultimately, to reach the aggressive goals outlined by the UN, a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary studies must be taken up by the academic community.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMIN018..02G
- Keywords:
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- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1910 Data assimilation;
- integration and fusion;
- INFORMATICS;
- 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS