Can the Paris Agreement Support Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals?

Abstract

This chapter provides an ex-ante, quantitative assessment of the synergies and trade-offs between the implementation of the Paris Agreement and sustainable development. It develops a framework for comparing historical and future sustainability performance that combines a Computable General Equilibrium model for describing future global and regional baseline and policy scenarios to 2030 with empirically-estimated relationships between macroeconomic variables and sustainability indicators. Results indicate that the commitments submitted within the Paris Agreement reduce the gap toward a sustainable 2030 in all regions, but heterogeneity across regions and sustainability indicators call for complementary sustainable development polices.