Are you interested in how to achieve the United Nations SDGs? Curious about the intersections of the various SDGs in practice? Are you invested in how development practitioners and conservationists collaborate, co-create, and intersect in their methods?

Mountain Sentinel network partners GMBA and ICIMOD authored a paper alongside PhD student Biraj Adhikari that sparks exciting discourse on the subjects above! If you are interested, check out the abstract below and the provided link to the paper.

Abstract

Achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) requires a context-specific understanding of how actions to achieve one goal interact with others. We analyzed statistical data, and conducted online surveys and interviews with conservation professionals to understand how terrestrial conservation goals (SDG 15: Life on land) influence and are influenced by other goals in Nepal. Our findings suggest that SDG 15 synergized with economic growth (SDG 8), gender equality (SDG 5), water access (SDG 6), sustainable production and consumption (SDG 12), and climate action (SDG 13), but traded off with food security (SDG 2), energy access (SDG 7), poverty alleviation (SDG 1), and infrastructure development (SDG 9). Increased multi-sectoral collaboration between conservation and development stakeholders is urgently needed to address the negative impacts of other goals on SDG 15. Additionally, conservation measures in Nepal can benefit from being more people-focused, participatory, and contextualized to mitigate negative impacts on socioeconomic goals.

Read the paper here!