Cross-cutting topic “SDGs: Hitting the targets” – working group meeting on “conflicting targets and synergies between different SDGs”

On 16 May, the group of GRoW researchers working on “conflicting targets and synergies between different SDGs” met at IWW Water Centre in Mülheim an der Ruhr.

The meeting began with discussing potential contributions of the GRoW projects which analyse and address SDG interlinkages to the event organised by GRoW at the Stockholm World Water Week. This event on “SDG trade-offs and synergies: Innovative methods and tools for improved decision making” will take place on Sunday 25 August 2019, more details will soon be available here.

The meeting then moved on with three short presentations by the GRoW projects WANDEL, InoCottonGROW and Trust. They each explained which effects on SDGs they aim to assess within their projects, and which methods the assessments are based on.

In the third part of the meeting, the group started to develop an overarching assessment procedure aiming at qualifying and quantifying interactions between SDGs and evaluating impacts on their achievements. This will try to combine expert judgements on SDG interactions with data on existing national indicators to evaluate key projects and policy strategies, such as the ones that are being developed in GRoW projects. Such an assessment procedure could potentially minimize conflicts between SDGs and harness synergies. 

The group decided to meet again on 27 June 2019 at the IWW Water Centre in Mülheim an der Ruhr.