Nexus and Challenges in Environment and Health toward SDGs

Dear Colleagues,

While there is an international consensus and enthusiasm for the 17 SDGs, doubts often persist about the possibility of achieving their many targets, given the inherent conflicts and trade-offs between the most diverse sectors involved. Reducing poverty, fighting hunger, and promoting health and well-being require resources that are constrained by interdependent forms of scarcity across the planetary dimension. Access to water, sanitation, and energy for poor populations as well as food security are situations where each chain affects the other in the form of trade-offs, and together, they all generate pressure on ecosystem services and characterize greater demands on greenhouse gas emissions. In this respect, some axes of transformative action are fundamental to establishing nexuses and synergies between the use of scarce resources and reducing the vulnerability of vast populations. For example, actions in the field of public health, with a wide range of interconnections with environmental issues and health determinants such as poverty, can generate broad convergences in benefit flows between different SDGs.

However, the composition of flows and transformations aimed at the SDGs also requires dialogues between complexities that transcend different scales. In this way, we can conceive that the search for sustainable development also implies finding meanings and possibilities that are legitimate at the smallest organizational scales, such as in peripheral urban, riverine, and indigenous communities. In addition to considering situations of vulnerability, we argue for the need to seek legitimacy between local contexts and measures aimed at resource scarcity and the tendencies of the Earth system to collapse. Therefore, we believe that the viability of the search for SDGs also refers to flows and transformations that include the diversity of knowledge and ways of using resources at the local level, combating tendencies of marginalization and misguided actions at the industrial scale. For this, it is assumed that unimaginable scopes of possible solutions must be relevant to connecting people with the planetary challenge of sustainable development.

Approaches of Interest:

Papers submitted for this Special Issue may cover a wide range of topics related to the SDGs, such as the following:

• Nexus research on trade-offs in pursuit of the SDGs;
• Knowledge democracy and transformations towards sustainability;
• Intersectoral actions and flows in pursuit of sustainability;
• Conflict relations between different social actors in achieving the SDGs.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Leandro Luiz Giatti
Dr. Lira Luz Benites Lazaro
Guest Editors

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• nexus research on trade-offs in pursuit of the SDGs
• knowledge democracy and transformations towards sustainability
• intersectoral actions and flows in pursuit of sustainability
• conflict relations between different social actors in achieving the SDGs