Future Earth's Science-Based Pathways for Sustainability Initiative
Abstract
Today's environmental and social challenges occur at multiple geographical scales and are inter-related in complex and often unseen ways. Decision makers no longer have the luxury of tackling individual economic or social issues without accounting for environmental concerns and vice versa. In response, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, providing a common global framework for peace and prosperity, for people and the planet. While governments, civil society and businesses around the world are making progress towards the goals, recent analyses have concluded that no country is currently on track to achieve all SDGs and there is still much to do to attain Agenda 2030 over the next decade. In particular, there is an urgent need for knowledge-based guidance on how to achieve all SDGs as a cohesive unit through novel partnerships across sectors of society, particularly in light of the potential synergies and trade-offs that exist between the different goals.
Future Earth is leading the Science Based Pathways for Sustainability Initiative to contribute to knowledge-based decision making that supports achievement of the SDGs within a resilient, life-supporting Earth system . It will achieve its objectives by co-designing sustainability pathways together with natural and social scientists, policy makers, business and civil society at the national level, followed by consolidation and integration at the regional and international levels. The national processes are using structured back-casting methodologies to develop integrated pathways to meet the SDGs on biodiversity, oceans, climate and freshwater. The co-designed pathways will be promoted in actionable policy briefs while building new partnerships across all scales. While pilot workshops are being conducted throughout 2019 in Canada, France, Germany and Japan, Future Earth invites all interested groups to join this new collective endeavour.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC23F1461T
- Keywords:
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- 0230 Impacts of climate change: human health;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1934 International collaboration;
- INFORMATICS;
- 6620 Science policy;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES