When it comes to the alarmingly slow progress that the world is making towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — United Nations targets set in 2015 to end poverty, achieve equality and protect the environment — those related to climate and the environment seem to be among those posing the biggest challenges.

“They are not 100% politically backed in all contexts, and they are really falling behind” compared to some of the other SDGs, says Shirin Malekpour, a social scientist from the Monash Sustainable Development Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, referring to SDG 12, which targets responsible consumption and production; SDG 13, climate action; SDG 14, life below water; and SDG 15, life on land.

Nature Index 2023 Climate and conservation

Malekpour is a member of an independent group of scientific advisers (IGS) to the UN that warned in its 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report — published ahead of the September 2023 SDG Summit of global heads of state in New York — that little or no progress had been made generally towards the SDGs at the half-way point to their 2030 deadline. “On our current trajectory, not even one of the SDGs will be achieved by 2030,” says Malekpour, but she adds that attaining the goal of protecting the planet looks especially remote.

A series of global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, is one factor in the stagnation of progress against SDG targets, says fellow IGS member, Åsa Persson, the deputy director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, a non-profit organization in Sweden that assesses environmental and sustainability policy. “However, we’re very clear in the report that we can’t just blame these external shocks,” she says. “We were on the wrong track well before these crises, for the simple reason that we are not doing enough.”

Research scorecard

An independent report, commissioned by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the United Kingdom’s central public research funder, underscores the issue. Most published science isn’t even trying to address the SDGs, according to the 2022 Changing Directions report, produced by the Steering Research and Innovation for the Global Goals (STRINGS) project, a consortium of seven universities led by the University of Sussex and University College London (UCL), both in the United Kingdom, and the United Nations.

In high- and upper middle-income countries, for example, just 20–40% of publications and 2–5% of patented inventions relate to the SDGs, says Joanna Chataway, a science and innovation policy researcher at UCL and co-leader of the project. In low-income countries, by comparison, where SDG challenges are most acute, 60–80% of research and 9% of patents were SDGs-related. These countries, however, produce only 0.2% of global published research. “The degree to which, despite genuine effort to shift it, the balance remains so heavily in favour of science being done in high-income countries and not involving low-income country researchers is very stark, and a major problem,” says Chataway. “You can’t begin to resolve the complex, thorny problems associated with SDGs 12 to 15 until you seriously involve local researchers from low-income countries.”

Where is the strongest research focus on the environment?

A shift in the research being done, and the way it is done, is required, Chataway says. A case study in the STRINGS report, which compares two ways of using science to make rice production more sustainable in the state of Odisha, India, illustrates part of the problem, she adds. The approach that receives the majority of the funding, led by national government organizations including the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the National Rice Research Institute, aims to breed new, more high-yielding and stress-tolerant rice varieties. The approach that is favoured by local farmers — sharing heirloom rice seeds, which are said to be more stress-resistant than modern varieties and are typically grown with minimal pesticides and fertilizers — receives very little investment by comparison. This lack of support makes it difficult for researchers and farmers to catalogue, evaluate and conserve heirloom varieties. “Pathways and agendas favoured by low-income farmers never get a shout in decisions about where the science goes, but it is where science could be really useful,” says Chataway.

Persson agrees. “We need more evaluative research asking the question, what sort of interventions work under what conditions and in what contexts?” she says. “Evaluative research may not be glamorous, but it is incredibly useful to decision-makers.”

Significant barriers limit the amount of evaluative research that gets done, says Malekpour. Universities tend to judge researchers’ performance on publication output in high-impact journals, which tend to favour novel findings, for instance, which means there is a lack of incentive for researchers to focus on evaluative work. “Research for the SDGs would really benefit from very actions-oriented, policy-oriented work, but this type of work is not particularly valued at academic institutions or by scientific publishers,” says Malekpour.

Ditching silos

The lack of evaluative work means it’s unclear what kind of research can actually deliver meaningful environmental outcomes. This should set off alarm bells for funders, says Chataway. “How does the science you fund contribute, or not, to meeting various elements of SDG 12 to 15?” she says. “We know very little about this, and without it, you just take a stab in the dark. A lot more effort needs to be put on the science of science — research on research.”

The complex and multifaceted goals in the environmental and climate SDGs also cannot be achieved by work in one research discipline alone. And yet, as highlighted in the STRINGS report, SDG research tends to be siloed, and so has limited impact. For example, the report discusses conflict over endangered endemic fish in Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, which face pressures from introduced predator species and overfishing. “The work highlighted a need to focus on fishery monitoring, regulation and governance, as well as interdisciplinary research into ecological, biological and livelihoods issues,” says Chataway. Data from the Nature Index also indicate a siloed approach. Of the 23,422 articles published in Nature Index journals between 2015 and 2022 that were related to at least one of the SDGs from 12 to 15, just 14.8% covered multiple SDGs.

“The multidisciplinary perspective can tackle different sides of the problem, and that’s useful,” says Malekpour. “But a lot of research that we call multidisciplinary is still, ‘the engineer does the engineering, and the sociologist does the sociology’.”

Multinational mission

Collaboration between countries, as well as between disciplines, is essential, says Chataway. The STRINGS report highlights the importance of context-specific research, conducted on the ground in low- and middle-income countries, and involving local researchers in meaningful leadership roles. The UKRI’s commissioning of the report suggests that some funders are starting to consider these issues, she says.

Persson argues that there’s still a long way to go for funders to invest sufficiently in cross-border research. “National funders are still very focused on supporting their national scientists, rather than funding international projects, and this is really concerning, both in view of the global challenges, but also the current geopolitics,” she says.

Adding to the imbalance in where SDG research is conducted, countries where the SDG challenges are most acute often lack a strong science system, says John Ouma-Mugabe, a member of the STRINGS project, based at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Science is often underfunded in many low- and middle-income countries, for example, and a lack of research-impact assessment means that available funding is not well targeted towards solving national problems. International partnerships — where implemented sensitively and locally co-led — can help to address this issue, says Ouma-Mugabe.

A strong science system can provide more than just the evidence base for change in environmental and climate policy — it can also provide a powerful voice to lobby for implementation of that policy. “The world knows how to address many of the challenges,” says Ouma-Mugabe, but certain factors lock decision-makers into failing to take the necessary action. In countries such as South Africa, for example, vested interests in fossil fuels undermine political will to advance policies that favour more sustainable alternatives. Change will happen if we can unlock these barriers, says Ouma-Mugabe.

“Research tells us that transformations usually start with niche ideas, innovations and practices that after some time, gain momentum, become widely adopted and eventually become the new normal,” says Malekpour. “We argue in the [UN] report that a lot has happened in the past seven years on the first phase, and we see these niche innovations and practices everywhere. The key challenge is how to make them widely adopted. What it really needs is political will, but also really strong demand by civil society for that acceleration to happen.”

Having reached the halfway point to 2030, with little to show for it, an urgent acceleration in SDG progress is required, the UN report states. “Many organizations are calling for more mission-oriented science for the SDGs,” says Persson. The International Science Council, for example, has called for dedicated funding towards transdisciplinary, collaborative projects to tackle problems such as plastic pollution on land and in water systems, or to consider trade-offs and risks in infrastructure development, such as building a hydroelectric dam in the Himalayas, for the wellbeing of countries, communities and ecosystems. “This could be very positive, both for putting more funding and effort into finding these transformative solutions, but also the symbolic effect of changing the incentive structure for science,” says Persson.

Compared with the cost of not reaching the SDGs targets, funding more SDG-related research and development is likely a very effective expenditure, says Persson. “It looks challenging to fully achieve SDGs by 2030, but every inch of progress matters.”