Three pathways to achieve global climate and sustainable development goals

Sustainable lifestyles, green-tech innovation, and government-led transformation each offer promising routes to make significant progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, according to a new study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and co-authored by researchers from Utrecht University's Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development.

The team of researchers examined how these strategies could transform consumption and production across different sectors, identifying both benefits and trade-offs for enhancing human well-being within planetary boundaries. Contrary to the belief that the path to sustainable development is increasingly out of reach, the results show that humankind has a variety of pathways to depart from its current unsustainable trajectory.

"Sustainable development pathways are strategies that prevent dangerous climate change while at the same time moving towards a world that allows people to prosper on a healthy planet,” explains Bjoern Soergel, a scientist at PIK and lead author of the study published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL). He emphasizes that these strategies align with the core objectives of the 17 SDGs agreed upon by the United Nations in 2015. Utrecht University's Professor and co-author Detlef van Vuuren highlights the pressing context: “Unfortunately, the world is not on track to meet the SDGs by 2030. This study presents a unique set of scenarios that describe how the SDGs can be met at some point in time using different strategies, based on combinations of technology change, lifestyle change, and redistribution of access to resources. This can help to make SDGs more tangible.”

Three Powerful Ways to Accelerate Sustainable Development

The study breaks new ground by systematically comparing different pathways to achieving a large set of SDGs. The scientists examined three primary strategies that could be used by governments, companies, and NGOs worldwide: sustainable lifestyles, green technology, and system-wide transformations led by government policy. This analysis, which includes four models, sheds light on both the potential and the challenges of these approaches for the global energy, economy, land, and climate systems.

"The Sustainable Development Pathways present a new set of long-term global model-based scenarios. They go beyond previous scenarios used by the IPCC and other large-scale assessments by presenting consistent visions of the future, co-created with social scientists, governance researchers, and stakeholders, which explore different forms of transformational change in our societies," says co-author Dr. Vassilis Daioglou, a researcher at Utrecht University and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL).

The other pathways focus on gradual improvements in consumption patterns, with green technology advancements or increased government intervention steering progress. These approaches present their own complexities. While they might be more achievable in the short term, they place heavier reliance on technological breakthroughs or structured, top-down changes in governance, which require careful coordination. Utrecht University researcher and co-author Geanderson Ambrósio highlights the collaborative approach taken in building these scenarios: “For the first time, the Sustainable Development Pathway (SDP) narratives were co-created by researchers, policymakers, and private sector representatives from across the globe through multiple online stakeholder meetings. Integrating these diverse inputs into model quantifications was challenging but essential to reflect multiple perspectives and enhance the reliability of these scenarios as relevant sustainability paths.”

A Call to Action: Choosing the Path Forward

Regardless of the strategy, the study’s findings emphasize that multiple avenues remain open for achieving sustainable development—albeit only if action is taken swiftly and decisively. “Even though the pathways differ in what they emphasize, they all can deliver”, says Elmar Kriegler, Head of the research department Transformation Pathways at PIK and co-author of the study. “This is important because the path to sustainable development is often narrowed to individual worldviews, making it more difficult to find common ground to embark on this journey. ” He concludes: “If we stick to our current trajectory, none of the SDGs will be achieved. By 2030, 660 million people could still be living in extreme poverty, and environmental crises like biodiversity loss and global warming will only get worse. So it is clear we must act now. We can still choose which sustainable path to pursue, but ignoring them is no longer an option.”