SNF Dialogues: The environment in 30 years

The world is confronting a convergence of deeply interconnected crises: low growth and rising debt distress, accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, food–energy–water insecurity, widening inequalities, rapid urbanization, geopolitical fragmentation, and declining trust in multilateral institutions. These challenges are nonlinear, spatially heterogeneous, and mutually reinforcing. As a result, single-sector or short-term responses often shift pressures across systems rather than resolving them. Addressing today’s global polycrisis therefore requires integrated, actionable, and spatially explicit transformation pathways that reconcile near-term trade-offs with long-term sustainability and resilience.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a comprehensive blueprint for systems transformation, and humanity already possesses the scientific knowledge, technological capacity, policy instruments, and financial resources needed to achieve them. Yet global implementation remains below 20 percent. This gap reflects weak accountability and the absence of an operational Global Commons mandated to coordinate, accelerate, and scale SDG implementation. A fit-for-purpose global architecture is urgently needed to align efforts, mobilize finance and technology, and deliver measurable outcomes.

Data-driven integrated assessment and systems modelling are central to this transition. By translating policy and investment decisions into quantified impacts across climate, energy, water, food, health, transport, and economic systems, integrated models make trade-offs, synergies, and distributional effects explicit. When combined with participatory governance, capacity building, and digital platforms, modelling becomes an operational decision-support framework.

The AE4RIA Global Climate Hub, operating under the auspices of the United Nations and which I lead, exemplifies this next generation of science–policy integration. As Chief Scientist of the 2027 United Nations Global Sustainable Development Report, I am leading the global effort to deliver integrated, policy-relevant evidence for the final push toward the 2030 Agenda and for building resilient, just, and sustainable systems beyond it.