Project Plan: Toward the Sustainable Development Goals - Treating Tradeoffs under Political Risk and Technological Uncertainty.

In long time-horizon projects, negotiation among multiple constituencies may lead to agreement on a set of goals and a target date for their realization, with at least the implicit admission that the goals cannot be reached using currently available technologies, or without trade-offs among the goals. In a budget-constrained environment, arbitrary prioritization of tasks will be resisted by the several constituencies. These conditions describe the situation of the United Nations' Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). This paper proposes a dual strategy. First, a "big data" effort to uncover geographic areas where the known SDG trade-offs (negative interactions) are of lesser or zero magnitude then elsewhere, and to investigate whether the conditions in that area are exportable to the rest of the world. Second, a technology forecasting-based heuristic to reduce negative interactions among the SDGs. We aim to prove characteristics of the heuristic in order to make it applicable to policy decisions that are more acceptable to constituencies yet scientifically sound. The paper describes a nascent project to obtain the data needed for turning the model into an action tool for speeding the SDGs' fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]