About
The SustainaTable presents the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals as a periodic table. Each goal is an element, grouped into the five families of the 2030 Agenda: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership. It is designed as a free entry point for students, educators and the public, sitting between the official goal icons and expert, data-heavy tools.
How the connections were chosen
Each synergy (+) and trade-off (−) is a qualitative, goal-level judgement informed by published work on SDG interactions, particularly the seven-point interaction scale of Nilsson, Griggs and Visbeck (2016), the International Council for Science guide to SDG interactions (2017) and the systematic analysis of Pradhan et al. (2017). Links describe typical relationships. Whether a link acts as a synergy or a trade-off can change with location, scale and policy design.
The engineering lens
This view shows how wastewater engineering and resource recovery relate to each goal. Direct means the field contributes to the goal's targets; indirect means it supports them through other goals. It follows the view of wastewater as a resource set out in the UN World Water Development Report 2017.
Limitations
Only three or four of each goal's targets are shown; all 169 are on the UN website. Goal aims and targets are paraphrased. Connections are not quantified and have not been peer reviewed. For quantified, target-level interlinkages with country data, use the IGES SDG Interlinkages Analysis & Visualisation Tool. The periodic-table format has been used before in sustainability, notably by Anastas and Zimmerman (2019) for green chemistry, which maps values and tools rather than the SDGs.
References
- Anastas, P. T. & Zimmerman, J. B. (2019). The periodic table of the elements of green and sustainable chemistry. Green Chemistry, 21(24), 6545–6566.
- ICSU (2017). A Guide to SDG Interactions: From Science to Implementation. International Council for Science, Paris.
- Nilsson, M., Griggs, D. & Visbeck, M. (2016). Map the interactions between Sustainable Development Goals. Nature, 534, 320–322.
- Pradhan, P., Costa, L., Rybski, D., Lucht, W. & Kropp, J. P. (2017). A systematic study of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) interactions. Earth's Future, 5(11), 1169–1179.
- United Nations (2015). Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1).
- WWAP (2017). The United Nations World Water Development Report 2017. Wastewater: The Untapped Resource. UNESCO, Paris.