UC Davis

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 benchmarks developed by the United Nations in 2015. The intent of the SDG framework is to bring sustainable prosperity to all people on Earth by the year 2030. As of June 2022, we are halfway through the period the SDG framework was designed to study and there have been countless papers published documenting the progress of these goals and their interactions. We performed a systematic review of 690 papers that document one or more SDG and analyzed research patterns and trends within this corpus, including: frequency of SDGs studied across time, geographic scale, SDG interactions, interactions interpreted by researchers as important or significant, and commonly used keywords corresponding with SDG research. In addition to analyzing overall SDG trends, our team aims to further analyze the SDG 2 within the context of the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, which highlights the authoring team’s areas of expertise and interest. The emphasis on the FEW nexus may serve as a demonstration of how trends in SDG research can shed light on the interdisciplinary relationships across sectors. Our team acknowledges that we are not experts on all 17 of the SDG realms and encourage other authors to use our open-source data to analyze other goals in a deeper way than we are capable.