The Beacon Project: Using Biodiversity and Energy justice to resolve Conflicts between Sustainable Development Goals

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promote global economic and social prosperity while simultaneously seeking to protect the environment. All UN member states are signatories to achieving SDGs under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, competing objectives of SDGs require decision-makers to trade-off SDGs, leading to damaging and unequal distribution of costs and benefits for people and the environment, which ultimately prevents sustainable development. To address this global problem I will apply a novel approach using hydropower as a model system, to deliver the critical step change in interdisciplinary research needed to quantify the trade-offs, conflicts and synergies between SDGs and between stakeholders. This project will identify, forecast, prevent and mitigate conflicts associated with development processes, to achieve equitable sustainable development now and beyond the 2030 sustainable development targets. Our global energy dilemma highlights and exemplifies trade-offs between SDGs. The increasing human population and growing energy demand challenges whether we can have secure, affordable and equitable energy without adversely affecting people and the environment. Solving the multifaceted challenges presented by the global energy dilemma has been hindered by the historic separation of environmental and social sciences and the humanities. This project combines these disciplines to address the complexity of energy development, stakeholder justice, and environmental sustainability. The overall aim of the project is to deliver the tools needed for equitable decision-making, by designing an innovative framework for decision-makers that explicitly considers the complex social-environmental dimensions of development. Large hydropower schemes (dam height >15 m) bring conflicts between SDGs and stakeholders into sharp focus. More than 9700 large hydropower dams have been constructed worldwide providing energy and boosting industrial infrastructure development. However, such dams have displaced an estimated 40-80 million people, and, through reservoir creation and river flow disruption, we have lost environments that are important for biodiversity and climate change mitigation. Thus, hydropower development puts significant pressure on SDGs that focus on local livelihoods and food security, justice and accountability, water, ecosystems and global biodiversity. Despite uncertainty over future energy gains under changing climatic and rainfall patterns, national and international investment for new dams is rising. To deliver the tools needed to ensure development processes are equitable and accountable, this project will engage multiple stakeholders, including those traditionally marginalised in the decision-making process, alongside high-level decision-makers across different socio-political and environmental contexts in Brazil, Kazakhstan, India and Scotland. Data and methods from social-environmental surveys, Earth observation, and the energy justice framework will be integrated throughout this project to develop a toolkit for local people, NGOs, civil society, and high-level decision-makers to increase equity and transparency of development processes. A network of more than 15 world-leading project partners including NGOs, international institutions, expert advisors and academic institutions actively support this research. To achieve international sustainable development, conflicts between SDGs and stakeholders must be prevented and resolved. This project delivers the innovative interdisciplinary tools needed to change current development decision-making practice to explicitly incorporate the complex social-environmental dimensions of development. Thus, this project will ensure that global development is equitable and sustainable now and beyond the 2030 targets.