Professor Jonathan Dawes and Dr Yixian Sun have been cited in the United Nations’ 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), while Dr Aurelie Charles contributed to the scientific review of the report.

The GSDR originated at the Rio De Janeiro Conference on sustainable development in 1992, when Member States were laying the groundwork for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Published every four years, the GSDR aims to strengthen the science-policy interface. The 2023 report supports discussions at this year’s UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in July and will be launched at the UN SDG Summit in September which marks the half-way point of the 2030 Agenda.

The GSDR cites the work of:

Professor Dawes said:

It is heartening to see that the policy literature is open to the challenges implicit in the consideration of synergies and trade-offs between the SDGs, and the ways in which system thinking is becoming embedded into policy design.

Dr Sun added:

This timely report documents the limited progress we have made at the halfway point to the 2030 Agenda and hopefully it can compel policymakers who attend the United Nations SDG Summit in New York this year to take stronger action.

Dr Aurelie Charles (Centre for Development Studies, Department of Social and Policy Sciences), who reviewed the Report for the International Science Council, stated that:

The report confirms that we are lagging behind the SDGs…this is due to the impact of COVID-19, climate change and a lack of investment and coordination towards the SDGs. Yet, it also shows that the positive synergies between disciplinary scientific knowledge, from mathematics to social sciences, together with indigenous, local knowledge are key to accelerating action for preserving life on Earth.

Read the full version of the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) on the UN website.