The United Nations have agreed upon 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and
associated 169 targets which comprise all relevant aspects of the social-ecological system.
They also aim to reduce climate change impacts and biodiversity loss, and are therefore
interconnected with the 2-degree climate target and the Aichi Biodiversity targets of the CBD
(Aichi targets, hereafter). All three conventions aim to secure human well-being in a
sustainable world and contain guidelines on how to monitor the society’s progress towards
achieving these goals. Yet, none of these goals and targets function independently, they
interconnect across sectors, offer synergies, contain dependencies and bear the risk of
trade-offs (Spangenberg 2016). In order to realize the vision of a future sustainable world it is
required a) to thoroughly analyse the interfaces between SDG or their individual targets,
Aichi targets and the 2-degree climate target and to develop solutions for minimizing tradeoffs
and optimizing synergies, b) to correspondingly co-design application oriented research
projects that will establish the basis to secure natural capital, and c) to bring scientists,
decision-makers and the general public together to assess, monitor and adjust respective
policies and implementation strategies towards achieving a balance between the targets of
the SDG, the CBD and the Paris Agreement. SustainCBW will develop an innovative
framework and examine available metrics with regard to their suitability for achieving
objectives a-c at both, the national and the global scale, as well as across different temporal
scales.
The Leibniz Research Alliance on Biodiversity (LVB) pools competencies and resources of
20 member institutes within the Leibniz Association, drawing on their experience in
integrative research on biodiversity, sustainable development and climate change. Our
overarching goal is to develop integrative solutions through inter- and transdisciplinary
research for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. With SustainCBW, the LVB
will establish a scientific nucleus to act as a development hub for the co-design of research
projects that will act as individual research pillars. It will serve as a synthesis hub for specific
research findings from each of the research pillars and support knowledge transfer into the
discourse of the three conventions. The central milestone will be to establish a research
network structure that identifies gaps in science, knowledge transfer or dissemination in
order to work towards closing existing gaps.
