Assessing the United Nations sustainable development goals from the inclusive wealth perspective

Unveiling complementarities between national sustainable development strategies through network analysis

The 2030 agenda of the United Nations provides a framework of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 232 indicators for its members to fulfill. The overall achievement critically depends on how nations understand the interactions between these SDGs and set priorities for development pathways. This study provides a comprehensive network analysis of global SDG complementarities, measured by the co-occurrences of SDG pairs' comparative advantages in the same region by adopting the 'product space' concept from economics. We construct the 'SDG space' at goal and indicator levels with the most recently available data and then validate its robustness by comparing it to the commonly used correlation network and confirm its predictive power using historical data. Network analysis reveals a strongly connected socioeconomic-related core and an environmental-related periphery, with 'bridge' indicators connecting different clusters. The goal-level space identifies the 'bridge' goals as SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 15 (Life on Hand) in the environmental-related cluster, while identifying SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), SDG 6 (Clean water and Sanitation), and SDG 16 (Justice and Strong Institutions) in the socioeconomic cluster. The indicator-level space provides details to explain how they act as 'bridges' in the network. In particular, 16-9: Free Press Index is the 'bridge' indicator with the highest betweenness centrality value and acts as the bottleneck indicator in China for its overall sustainable development. Improving it can enhance connected indicators' performance, leading to positive cascading effects on different aspects of sustainability.

Forest carbon removal potential and sustainable development in Japan

Forests play a crucial role in mitigating climate change and reducing emissions as a major carbon sink. However, its value in removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is always underestimated in natural capital (NC) accounting and sustainability assessments. This study predicted Japan's forest CO2 removal by afforestation and forest management and its monetary value until 2042 from national to gridded level, with statistical data and complementary satellite data products, and explored how that CO2 removal will contribute to sustainable development under the inclusive wealth (IW) framework. The results show that: (1) the annual CO2 removal by forests has the potential to offset 15.3% of the emission and increase NC by 6.8% in Japan, significantly contributing to carbon neutrality and IW growth; (2) the total CO2 removal in exiting forests will peak at around 2030 and then decrease, but expanding afforestation could offset that decrease in later years; (3) the spatial distribution patterns of IW and forest CO2 removal are opposite. This indicates a national carbon trading market could create new wealth for rural communities where vast forests exist, and then effectively balance the inequal urban-rural development in Japan. The explicit spatial information of this study could provide valuable information for differentiating policy priorities of forestry planning and sustainable development in different local communities.