Balancing national economic policy outcomes for sustainable development

The 2030 agenda for sustainable development aims at improving combined economic, social, and environmental performance. However, crafting national economic policies to progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is hindered by the complexity of multi-sector economies and the multidimensional nature of the policies involved in sustainability decision-making. We introduce a framework that enables policy-makers to sift through complex, multi-sector, multi-actor policy performance spaces to identify efficient national economic policy portfolios for sustainable development and balanced social and political impacts. The framework combines economy-wide sustainability performance simulation, artificial intelligence-driven multiobjective multi-SDG policy search, and multi-actor multi-sector policy deliberation to identify and screen efficient policy portfolios that maximize synergies and balance trade-offs between sustainable development targets. We demonstrate the framework on Egypt by crafting portfolios of national economic policies directed towards poverty reduction, inequality reduction, economic growth, sustainable consumption and production patterns, and climate change mitigation. Results show that using integrated policy strategies can help achieve sustainable development while balancing the adverse distributional and political impacts of sustainability reforms.

BASHEER Mohammed;  NECHIFOR VOSTINARU Victor;  CALZADILLA Alvaro;  RINGLER Claudia;  HULME David;  HAROU Julien J.; 

2022-09-12

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

JRC126003

2041-1723 (online),   

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32415-9,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC126003,   

10.1038/s41467-022-32415-9 (online),