Interlinkages and interactions among the Sustainable Development Goals

By identifying strong synergies and trade-offs across the Sustainable Development Goals and related targets, countries can design integrated and coherent policies and leverage policy efficiency. Moreover, it allows countries to prioritize the allocation of scarce resources toward targeted programs and projects to achieve optimal sustainable development outcomes. The world is currently grappling with a confluence of crises, primarily driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and increased conflicts. These multifaceted and interrelated crises have exacerbated pre-existing challenges, resulting in significant and far-reaching impacts on all of the Sustainable Development Goals. Discussing these challenges, this chapter introduces the contributions to this edited volume that discuss the seminal research to define, identify and present conceptual frameworks for interlinkages among the goals and targets. The chapter analyses and compares the Sustainable Development Goals, targets and indicators to identify possible interlinkages and identify areas, tools, frameworks and data collection that can facilitate the quantification and analysis of SDG interlinkages. The chapter also introduces research and evidence that may be employed by policy makers to make integrated and coherent decisions in the area of sustainable development.