Recently, Liu Yali, a young faculty member from the College of Grassland Science, has taken the lead as the first author on a research paper published in The Innovation (Impact Factor: 32.1), titled "Overlooked Uneven Progress Across Sustainable Development Goals at the Global Scale: Challenges and Opportunities." This article delves into the often-neglected disparities within the sustainable development goals, discussing the ensuing challenges and potential opportunities for progress.

Differences in progress across sustainable development goals (SDGs) are widespread globally; meanwhile, the rising call for prioritizing specific SDGs may exacerbate such gaps. Nevertheless, how these progress differences would influence global sustainable development has been long neglected. Here, we present the first quantitative assessment of SDGs’ progress differences globally by adopting the SDGs progress evenness index. Our results highlight that the uneven progress across SDGs has been a hindrance to sustainable development because (1) it is strongly associated with many public health risks (e.g., air pollution), social inequalities (e.g., gender inequality, modern slavery, wealth gap), and a reduction in life expectancy; (2) it is also associated with deforestation and habitat loss in terrestrial and marine ecosystems, increasing the challenges related to biodiversity conservation; (3) most countries with low average SDGs performance show lower progress evenness, which further hinders their fulfillment of SDGs; and (4) many countries with high average SDGs performance also showcase stagnation or even retrogression in progress evenness, which is partly ascribed to the antagonism between climate actions and other goals. These findings highlight that while setting SDGs priorities may be more realistic under the constraints of multiple global stressors, caution must be exercised to avoid new problems from intensifying uneven progress across goals. Moreover, our study reveals that the urgent needs regarding SDGs of different regions seem complementary, emphasizing that regional collaborations (e.g., demand-oriented carbon trading between SDGs poorly performed and well-performed countries) may promote sustainable development achievements at the global scale.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42001267, 42041005, and 42041007), the International Partnership Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (121311KYSB20170004-04), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Strategic Priority Research Program (A) (grant no. XDA20050103).

The Innovation is a multidisciplinary English-language academic journal, launched in 2020 through the collaboration of young scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Cell Press. As an emerging interdisciplinary publication, it is dedicated to fostering scientific advancement by featuring pioneering research and high-caliber scholarly articles.

Paper link: https://www.cell.com/the-innovation/fulltext/S2666-6758(24)00011-0