Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals leads to lower world population growth

The future of world population growth matters for future human well-being and interactions with the natural environment. We show the extent to which world population growth could be reduced by fully implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) whose health and education targets have direct and indirect consequences on future mortality and fertility trends. Although this assessment is consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change context, it is inconsistent with the prediction range of the United Nations projections for which we present sensitivity analyses and suggests that their range is likely too narrow. Given our assumptions, the SDGs have a sizable effect on global population growth, providing an additional rationale for vigorously pursuing their implementation.