Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were designed to reconcile environmental protection with socioeconomic development. Here, we compare SDG indicators to a suite of external measures, showing that while most countries are progressing well towards environmental SDGs, this has little relationship with actual biodiversity conservation, and instead better represents socioeconomic development. If this continues, the SDGs will likely serve as a smokescreen for further environmental destruction throughout the decade.
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All R scripts used to process the data are available from the corresponding authors upon request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank S. Z. Z. Rahim and D. C. J. Yeo for their contributions towards improving this paper. Y.Z. and L.R.C. acknowledge support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its Commonwealth Research Fellowship grant NRF-CSC-ICFC2017-05.
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Y.Z. and L.R.C. conceived the study. Y.Z. carried out the analyses. Y.Z., S.M., R.K.R., O.V., J.E.M.W. and L.R.C. contributed discussions and modelling insights. Y.Z., S.M., R.K.R., O.V., J.E.M.W. and L.R.C. wrote the manuscript.
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Zeng, Y., Maxwell, S., Runting, R.K. et al. Environmental destruction not avoided with the Sustainable Development Goals. Nat Sustain 3, 795–798 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0555-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0555-0
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