Research supporting the SDGs: where are we in the EU?

Scientific research has been acknowledged to play a pivotal role in achieving the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda. Vice-versa, since its adoption, the 2030 Agenda has been reinvigorating the academic production on sustainable development. The European Union, specifically, strongly committed itself to the SDGs with the six headline priorities set by President Von der Leyen’s Commission, in particular via the European Green Deal. Thus, the EU is putting much effort into producing and managing high-quality data and research is definitely supporting this. However, several questions still arise. What approaches is research specifically using or developing to support the achievement of the SDGs in the EU? How is research contributing to measuring progress in the SDGs at all scales? Which are the most investigated Goals, Targets, and sustainability domains, and which need further research?

We have been conducing a systematic literature review to respond to these questions, just published in MDPI Sustainability. The results from the descriptive analysis highlighted a rising interest of scholars in operationalizing the 2030 Agenda, with a growing interest on the urban level implementation. Our SDG Mapper tool was employed for the first time in academic literature as well for screening the most detected Goals and Targets. The most recurrent research fields on the SDGs in the EU are governance, circular economy, ecosystem services, urban localization, and decision making. We advise future studies to focus on gaps highlighted and adopt a system perspective, boosting Policy Coherence across governance levels and scales of implementation by looking at trade-offs and assessing context-specific priorities.

If you want to know more on this and read the full paper, you can click here.