Telecoupled environmental impacts are an obstacle to meeting the sustainable development goals

Abstract

International trade is responsible for connecting human and natural systems across distant countries, and has profound implications for sustainability. In particular, telecoupling, the socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant countries as a result of, among others, global trade, typically leaves less affluent nations bearing the largest environmental impacts. Telecoupling effects are likely to be pervasive to those trying to achieve the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but little is known about how telecoupling affects the SDGs beyond a subset of environment-related targets. Here, we take a broad global network analysis approach to address this gap, a..