Editing IPCC:AR6/SR15/Chapter-1 (section)

== Cross-Chapter Box 4: Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals ==

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====== Lead Authors ======

* Diana Liverman (United States)
* Mustafa Babiker (Sudan)
* Purnamita Dasgupta (India)
* Riyanti Djalante (Japan, Indonesia)
* Stephen Humphreys (United Kingdom, Ireland)
* Natalie Mahowald (United States)
* Yacob Mulugetta (United Kingdom, Ethiopia)
* Maria Virginia Vilariño (Argentina)
* Henri Waisman (France)

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Sustainable development is most often defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED, 1987) <sup>[[#fn:r272|272]]</sup> and includes balancing social well-being, economic prosperity and environmental protection. The AR5 used this definition and linked it to climate change (Denton et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r273|273]]</sup> . The most significant step since AR5 is the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the emergence of literature that links them to climate (von Stechow et al., 2015; Wright et al., 2015; Epstein and Theuer, 2017; Hammill and Price-Kelly, 2017; Kelman, 2017; Lofts et al., 2017; Maupin, 2017; Gomez-Echeverri, 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r274|274]]</sup> .

In September 2015, the UN endorsed a universal agenda – ‘Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ – which aims ‘to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path’. Based on a participatory process, the resolution in support of the 2030 agenda adopted 17 non-legally-binding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets to support people, prosperity, peace, partnerships and the planet (Kanie and Biermann, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r275|275]]</sup> .

The SDGs expanded efforts to reduce poverty and other deprivations under the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There were improvements under the MDGs between 1990 and 2015, including reducing overall poverty and hunger, reducing infant mortality, and improving access to drinking water (United Nations, 2015a) <sup>[[#fn:r276|276]]</sup> . However, greenhouse gas emissions increased by more than 50% from 1990 to 2015, and 1.6 billion people were still living in multidimensional poverty with persistent inequalities in 2015 (Alkire et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r277|277]]</sup> .

The SDGs raise the ambition for eliminating poverty, hunger, inequality and other societal problems while protecting the environment. They have been criticised: as too many and too complex, needing more realistic targets, overly focused on 2030 at the expense of longer-term objectives, not embracing all aspects of sustainable development, and even contradicting each other (Horton, 2014; Death and Gabay, 2015; Biermann et al., 2017; Weber, 2017; Winkler and Satterthwaite, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r278|278]]</sup> .

Climate change is an integral influence on sustainable development, closely related to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of the SDGs. The IPCC has woven the concept of sustainable development into recent assessments, showing how climate change might undermine sustainable development, and the synergies between sustainable development and responses to climate change (Denton et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r279|279]]</sup> . Climate change is also explicit in the SDGs. SDG13 specifically requires ‘urgent action to address climate change and its impacts’. The targets include strengthening resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters; integrating climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning; and improving education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity.

Targets also include implementing the commitment undertaken by developed-country parties to the UNFCCC to the goal of mobilizing jointly 100 billion USD annually by 2020 and operationalizing the Green Climate Fund, as well as promoting mechanisms for raising capacity for effective climate change-related planning and management in least developed countries and Small Island Developing States, including focusing on women, youth and local and marginalised communities. SDG13 also acknowledges that the UNFCCC is the primary international, intergovernmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change.

Climate change is also mentioned in SDGs beyond SDG13, for example in goal targets 1.5, 2.4, 11.B, 12.8.1 related to poverty, hunger, cities and education respectively. The UNFCCC addresses other SDGs in commitments to ‘control, reduce or prevent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases […] in all relevant sectors, including the energy, transport, industry, agriculture, forestry and waste management sectors’ (Art4, 1(c)) and to work towards ‘the conservation and enhancement, as appropriate, of […] biomass, forests and oceans as well as other terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems’ (Art4, 1(d)). This corresponds to SDGs that seek clean energy for all (Goal 7), sustainable industry (Goal 9) and cities (Goal 11) and the protection of life on land and below water (14 and 15).

The SDGs and UNFCCC also differ in their time horizons. The SDGs focus primarily on 2030 whereas the Paris Agreement sets out that ‘Parties aim […] to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century’.

The IPCC decision to prepare this report on the impacts of 1.5°C and associated emission pathways explicitly asked for the assessment to be in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty. Chapter 1 frames the interaction between sustainable development, poverty eradication and ethics and equity. Chapter 2 assesses how risks and synergies of individual mitigation measures interact with 1.5°C pathways within the context of the SDGs and how these vary according to the mix of measures in alternative mitigation portfolios (Section 2.5). Chapter 3 examines the impacts of 1.5°C global warming on natural and human systems with comparison to 2°C and provides the basis for considering the interactions of climate change with sustainable development in Chapter 5. Chapter 4 analyses strategies for strengthening the response to climate change, many of which interact with sustainable development. Chapter 5 takes sustainable development, eradicating poverty and reducing inequalities as its focal point for the analysis of pathways to 1.5°C and discusses explicitly the linkages between achieving SDGs while eradicating poverty and reducing inequality.

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'''Cross-Chapter Box 4: Figure 1 Climate action is number 13 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals'''

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