In September 2015, the world’s leaders agreed to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 for sustainable development (UN 2015), including 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDGs provide a remarkable common global vision towards a safe, just and sustainable world for all human beings to thrive on the planet. The goals are seen as ambitions, and challenges, for all countries of all income levels, without exception. Between them, they provide a more resolved view of sustainable development than simply talking about economic, social and environmental dimensions; indeed, most goals are at least partially integrated across these dimensions. As such, the SDGs provide a normative framing that is “indivisible and universal” for the emerging discipline of sustainability science.

From the perspective of being “indivisible”, there is a growing appreciation of the interactions and dependencies among the goals, both in terms of substance and for coherent policy alignment. A key area that exemplifies the need to manage interactions relates to progress on climate change, the subject of SDG13 as well as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The latest scientific findings on climate change show that the hoped-for plateauing of growth in greenhouse gas emissions has not yet occurred (Jackson et al. 2017), and global warming in 2017 reached 1 C above pre-industrial conditions (WMO 2018). Research reaffirms that further warming will occur, which will cause coupled changes in all components of the climate system and amplify existing risks faced by natural and human systems (IPCC Working Group I 2013). Reversing this trend will require a major departure from business-as-usual and a change from incremental to exponential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (eg Rockström et al. 2016). However, success on climate change will depend on aligning with other SDGs (eg SDG12 on responsible consumption and production); and success in meeting other SDGs will in turn depend on controlling climate change (eg hunger, SDG2). A key role of the research community is to provide knowledge to understand synergies and trade-offs so that challenging decisions can be made to maximise the synergies and minimise tradeoffs (Griggs et al. 2014).