Five priorities for UN-Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Restructure data-gathering and evaluation networks to address climate change, energy, food, health and water provision say a Nature comment.
The SDGs place greater demands on the scientific community than did the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which they replace1. Addressing climate change, renewable energy, food, health and water
provision requires coordinated global monitoring and modelling of many factors - social, economic and environmental.
To guide action, the connections between SDG targets need to be better understood. Some synergies and trade-offs depend on scale - for instance, greater fertilizer use mightincrease food production and incomes locally, but would exacerbate pollution. Climate-change mitigation tends to happen at a local scale, but the consequences are global.
The comment lays out five priorities for how the scientific community should participate in this process, based on the findings of a scientific review of the draft SDGs conducted by the International Council for Science (ICSU).