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Why Strong Environmental Action Shouldn't Be Up for Debate in Achieving the SDGs

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their 169 underlying targets were introduced by the United Nations in 2015 as a global framework for achieving sustainable development by 2030. However, the SDGs are not isolated goals: they are interconnected, meaning that progress towards one can support another, creating a synergy, or hinder progress elsewhere, creating a trade-off.

These interactions make achieving the SDGs complex, particularly when it comes to strong environmental action, defined in this essay as ambitious action aimed at protecting the natural environment and addressing environmental degradation. Such action can create both synergies and trade-offs with social and economic goals. For example, replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy can advance renewable energy (SDG 7), while competition for agricultural land can threaten food security (SDG 2).

This essay therefore asks: Will strong environmental action create significant trade-offs with social and economic goals and, in doing so, compromise the achievement of the SDGs? This question is explored through the SDG wedding cake model, climate action, approaches to managing trade-offs, and the consequences of crossing planetary boundaries.

Looking at the research through my own personal lens, I'd argue that while trade-offs are real, they do not justify weaker environmental action. The natural environment is the foundation on which societies and economies depend. Protecting it is therefore essential to achieving the SDGs and should not be up for debate.

Without functioning ecosystems, there’s no cake

Human societies and the economy cannot succeed by neglecting what sustains them: the natural environment. The 2030 Agenda, the framework that gave the 17 SDGs their formal home, recognises this dependence: paragraph 33 explicitly states that social and economic development depends on sustainable management of the planet’s natural resources.

The 2030 Agenda's commitment to environmental protection is reflected in SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), which addresses water access, quality and sustainable management; SDG 13 (Climate Action), which calls for urgent action on climate change and its impacts; SDG 14 (Life Below Water), which promotes the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and marine resources; and SDG 15 (Life on Land), which addresses terrestrial ecosystem protection, land degradation and biodiversity loss. Together, these goals form the biosphere layer at the foundation of the SDG wedding cake model, shown in the image below.

The SDG wedding cake model visualises the 2030 Agenda’s recognition that society and the economy depend on the natural environment: the biosphere forms the foundation, supporting society and, through it, the economy. Its layers build on one another: ecosystems provide food, freshwater and raw materials, alongside essential services such as pollination, water purification and climate regulation. These functions sustain communities, livelihoods and economic activity. Progress towards the social and economic SDGs therefore depends on maintaining this ecological foundation, whose degradation can undermine development across multiple goals.

In other words: without that foundation, there is no cake.

Read more about the SDGs wedding cake here.

SDG 13: one goal, but synergies across the cake

Zooming in further on SDG 13 (Climate Action) reveals how environmental action can create synergies across the wedding cake’s societal and economic layers. SDG 13 is particularly relevant to zoom in on, because the impacts of climate change, such as rising temperatures, drought and sea-level rise, threaten the health of all ecosystems, from terrestrial to freshwater and marine ecosystems.

The importance of climate action becomes even clearer when its connections with the wider SDG framework are considered. A structured review mapped both climate change and climate action against each of the 17 SDGs and their 169 underlying targets, assessing where they could support or hinder progress. As shown in the image below, climate action could help advance 134 targets across all 17 goals. Going back to the SDG wedding cake model, climate action can protect ecosystems and biodiversity (SDG target 15.5) in the biosphere layer, improve health by reducing air pollution (SDG target 3.9) in the societal layer, and create employment opportunities in low-carbon industries (SDG target 8.5) in the economic layer.

In contrast, climate change could undermine 72 targets across 16 of the 17 goals, making progress towards these targets more difficult. This shows that progress on SDG 13 can have benefits that extend far beyond climate action itself, supporting environmental, social and economic development at the same time.

This same study also identified potential trade-offs, meaning that progress on SDG 13 can hinder progress on other SDGs and their underlying targets. The findings: climate action could hinder progress towards 34 targets across 12 SDGs. However, this needs to be put into perspective: these 34 potential trade-offs sit alongside potential synergies with 134 targets across all 17 SDGs.

Read the full paper here.

Trade-offs are real, but not inevitable

So, do these trade-offs with other SDGs mean that strong environmental action should be avoided? No, but they highlight the need to consider how environmental action is designed and implemented. Bioenergy production illustrates this well: growing crops for fuel can reduce reliance on fossil fuels but compete with food production for land, creating a potential conflict between renewable energy (SDG target 7.2) and food security (SDG target 2.1). Yet, bioenergy markets in the Nordic region have supported agricultural and forestry production by diversifying income opportunities and strengthening producers’ resilience. This shows why trade-offs cannot be assumed to occur everywhere: local resources and production systems shape whether environmental action helps or hinders other goals.

In Forrest and the Otways in Victoria, local stakeholders worked with researchers to identify sustainability priorities and explore different future pathways. Combining local knowledge with modelling helped identify potential conflicts between environmental, social and economic goals before decisions were made. This provides another example of how trade-offs can be anticipated and managed through participation and evidence-based planning.

Thus, strong environmental action can definitely create trade-offs, but these are not necessarily unavoidable or unmanageable. The principle of a just transition provides one way of managing them. Environmental policies such as decarbonisation can negatively affect workers and communities that depend on carbon-intensive industries, but these impacts can be anticipated and reduced through compensation, social safety nets, retraining, alternative employment and regional development policies. Rather than weakening environmental action, these measures address the social and economic consequences of implementing it.

Economies can recover, extinct species cannot

While trade-offs from strong environmental action must be acknowledged, they need to be weighed against a fundamental risk: some damage to the planet’s life-support systems is irreversible. The planetary boundaries framework, first proposed by Rockström et al., identifies nine critical Earth-system processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the planet. Crossing any of these boundaries increases the risk of large-scale and potentially irreversible environmental change.

This risk is not theoretical. The most recent assessment shows just how far this pressure has progressed: seven of the nine planetary boundaries have now been transgressed, as illustrated in the figure below. One of the transgressed boundaries is biosphere integrity, which captures the diversity and functioning of living organisms and ecosystems. But what does the loss of this integrity look like in practice?

The consequences of our actions become painfully tangible in the documentary 'How to Live on Earth', which shows fruit farmers in China pollinating blossoms by hand in areas where natural pollinators have declined due to pesticide use and other human pressures. What bees once provided as an ecosystem service must now be replaced by human labour on Chinese orchards, with farmers’ incomes depending on successful pollination. The pollination that nature once provided for free now comes at a cost. That cost extends beyond the environmental SDGs in the wedding cake model into the societal and economic layers.

UNEP links the loss of wild species that provide crop pollination to declining agricultural productivity. Less effective pollination can therefore affect food production, while replacing a natural ecosystem service with human labour creates an economic burden. The situation in China shows why environmental protection cannot simply be treated as another competing priority: damage to the environmental foundation can ripple through the social and economic layers that depend on it.

Read more here.

Are you prepared to do the bee’s job?

Environmental protection is not separate from social and economic development, but the foundation on which both depend, making strong environmental action essential to lasting SDG achievement across all three layers of the SDG wedding cake model. The 2030 Agenda itself recognises this interdependence, with the SDGs designed as integrated and indivisible across the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainable development. Society and the economy cannot thrive while their ecological foundation deteriorates. Research into the synergies of climate action reinforces this argument: progress on SDG 13 could benefit targets across all 17 SDGs, while climate change threatens progress across 16.

Trade-offs exist, but a just transition can reduce social and economic impacts through compensation, social safety nets, retraining, alternative employment and regional development policies, while community participation and evidence-based planning can help anticipate and manage competing priorities. The answer, therefore, is better implementation, not weaker environmental action.

Ultimately, economic and social progress cannot last if the natural systems supporting it continue to decline. Crossing the planetary boundary for biosphere integrity risks irreversible losses, including species extinction. The hand pollination of Chinese orchards shows what this can mean in practice.

Before we decide that protecting nature is too costly, we should consider the alternative: are we prepared to take over the work nature currently does for us? Who, after all, will do the bees’ job?

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