Key messages

• Countries are not on a path toward sustainable development and are failing to make sufficient progress on implementing the Sustainable Development Goal or achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. Failing to accelerate implementation, countries risk undermining hard-won global achievements that, in some cases, took decades to negotiate. To accelerate implementation, the 2023 stocktaking exercises of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda call on countries to seek synergies in implementation.
• All countries who are Parties to the Paris Agreement are expected to submit new and more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in early 2025. This is an opportunity to increase efforts towards strengthening domestic sustainable development and climate ambition, whilst simultaneously ensuring that their global commitments are achieved. To increase ambition, countries need to focus on synergies between the NDC, the SDGs and the domestic policy environment, to help navigate domestic politics and avoid fragmentation that arises in traditional siloed policymaking.
• Synergies are predominant in the academic and policy literature but are difficult to transform and operationalize in prevalent socio-economic contexts of different countries. To translate synergies from paper to practice, government officials need to account for the contextualized nature of synergies and the national constraints that many countries are facing. Many of the issues, trade-offs and decisions that countries will face in preparing and finalizing their NDCs will essentially involve conversations on how to develop sustainably and could usefully be viewed through an SDG lens.
• Institutional strengthening is a prerequisite to prevent siloed decision making. However, a synergistic approach also requires that government officials develop strategies for overcoming the incoherence embedded in the messiness of the policy process and capacity to navigate the political landscape and vested interests that work against progress on climate change and sustainable development.
• To be truly transformative, a synergistic approach must anticipate the effects of climate and sustainable development policies, including local, transboundary and teleconnected spillover effects; and particularly those effects that risk increasing the vulnerability of already exposed groups.
• A synergistic approach ensures meaningful integration between domestic priorities and global commitments on climate change and the SDGs. A synergistic approach is, however, merely a starting point to a long and transformative process towards a low-carbon and climate-resilient future that leaves no one behind.