SDSN Northern Europe joins new project on Science in action: intersecting pathways to the SDGs across scales in the drylands (XPaths)

The SDSN Northern Europe secretariat collaborates in new project to identify inclusive pathways to a sustainable future in global drylands. Increasing social and environmental pressures, rising inequalities and conflicts related to water availability are some of the challenges that countries in these areas meet. SDSN Northern Europe will use the SDG Impact Assessment Tool to assess the impact of proposed actions to achieve the SDGs and the SDSN networks of Spain, Brazil and Sahel are supporting the project.

This project addresses the critical issues of co-designing inclusive pathways towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a science-action research process in three critical dryland regions – Senegal, Brazil, and Spain. The project will advance knowledge on barriers and leverage points for the achievement of the SDGs through participative transdisciplinary processes operating at multiple levels, from local to global, as a means to connect global goals to local issues and aspirations.

The project combines cutting-edge approaches of systems thinking, resilience thinking, cross-scale modeling and participative techniques to co-design and act upon pathways to reach the SDGs. In addition, it identifies how pathways towards SDGs in drylands are influenced by distal regions, such as Sweden and the EU, through a number of factors, such as trade, investment, and development policies. Finally, the project employs archetype analysis to shed light on which elements of pathways towards the SDGs, and which leverage points are recurrent across dryland regions, and therefore potentially transferable to other related contexts.

The project title is “Science in action: intersecting pathways to the SDGs across scales in the drylands (XPaths)”. It is funded by Formas – the Swedish research council for sustainable development – and is run by the SDSN Northern Europe Member Stockholm University via the Stockholm Recilience Centre. The project period is 2020-2023. In addition to SDSN Northern Europe, the SDSN networks of Spain, Brazil and Sahel are supporting the project.

Contact SDSN Northern Europe Network Manager Martin Eriksson for more information.