New study: Global sustainable development trends reveal widespread inequality and tradeoffs

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a series of goals adopted by all members state of the United Nations. The total of 169 goals were set in 2015 as part of 17 wider goals to end poverty, increase environmental protection, and ensure that all people live in peace and prosperity by 2030. Despite much media coverage focussing on the lack of global achievement towards the goals, the SDGs remain an important and ambitious values statement for the world to aspire.

Where on earth should efforts be concentrated to increase SDG progress? Which goals are progressing, stagnant, or deteriorating? Various measures have been empolyed to measure SDG progress in order to answer such questions. Sustainable development (SD) can be measured in a number of ways, but most tend to rely on national, subnational, and city-level figures from national statistical offices. Such measures unfortunately have a number of limitations. In addition to the common statistical methods issues of normalisation , imputation, and aggregation affecting the figures, national figures can obscure the heterogeneity of progress within a nation. Regional differences may be lost in an averaged national figure, for example where progress in urban areas may obscure challenges in rural areas.

The paper published in Communications Sustainability, led by Yangyang Guo of the ARC Laureate Team, employs an innovative method to overcome this traditional limitation of data. Guo and eight co-authors, including ARC Laureate Xuemei Bai, track grid-level SD indicators that capture fine-scale geographic variation while integrating multiple environmental, socioeconomic, and infrastructural datasets within a common framework. The indicators used in this study are gridded carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, ambient particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations, night-time light (Nightlight) intensity, and vegetation greening.

To date when these indicators have been investigated, they have tended to be done so individually. There is little knowledge on whether and how these indicators may track in relation to one another. Put another way, identifying whether and how these indicators increase, decrease, or remain static in relation to each other can help identify “where sustainable development-related dimensions improve together, deteriorate together, or diverge across space”, which in turn will help “supporting more targeted, place-based interventions” in the future (Guo et al. 2026).

A number of findings emerge from the study:

• Only 5.2% of the global population experienced substantial improvement across all four dimensions. These were concentrated mainly in the high-income regions of Western Europe, Northern Europe, and Northern America.

• Moderately deteriorating patterns accounted for 25.3% of land area and 25.1% of the population. The pattern was prevalent in Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South-eastern Asia, where substantial proportions of both land area and population were exposed to moderate or substantial deterioration.

• The dominant pattern is mixed trends, affecting 42.3% of the global land area and affecting nearly 3.3 billion people (roughly half the global population).

• A weak correlation was found between GDP per capita metrics and SD trends, suggesting that economic improvement by itself does not give a good indication of SDG progress.

• Future projections were made by calculating population increases, suggesting that global inequality in sustainable development outcomes will widen by 2030. The challenges towards sustainable development look likely to be concentrated in low- to upper-middle-income countries, while high-income countries remain more stable and concentrated in favourable categories.

The overall picture to emerge from the findings is sobering. The study finds that “the global challenge is not only that too few places are improving, but also that improvement itself is highly uneven, multidimensional, and spatially stratified.” That is, SDG gains are limited and globally unequal, with high-income countries showing the more positive trend while lower-middle-income countries show mixed or deteriorating trends.

“We find that global sustainable development over the past two decades has been uneven and trade-off-prone, rather than broadly progressive. Only a small share of land and population experienced improvement across all four dimensions, while deterioration in at least one dimension was wide-spread. Most places followed mixed trends, where gains in socioeconomic activity, vegetation greening, or pollution reduction were accompanied by setbacks elsewhere.” (Guo et al. 2026)

The authors call for more equitable policies to counter this trend of globally skewed improvement. Areas showing substantial or moderate deterioration have multiple sustainable development pressures converging, meaning that integrated responses are likely to be more effective than single-sector interventions. “High-resolution, multidimensional monitoring can provide a more actionable basis for identifying where pressures are concentrated, where trade-offs are most acute, and where more equitable pathways towards the SDGs are most urgently needed.”

Reference

Guo, Y., Yu, W., Xu, R., Xu, Z., Ye, T., Tong, M., Vardoulakis, S., Guo, Y., and Bai, X. Global sustainable development trends reveal widespread inequality and tradeoffs. Commun. Sustain. 1, 123 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44458-026-00124-9