Modelling projections
Transforming Australia’s assessment of current progress towards the SDGs shows that Australia will not fulfil its commitment to achieve the SDGs without major shifts from business as usual.
To achieve the SDGs, we will need to overcome the short-term focus and siloed thinking in decision-making that currently dominates our political landscape, and work collectively to achieve a ‘fair go’ for the next generation.
The latest Transforming Australia assessment includes modelling to explore future opportunities for Australia to accelerate progress towards the SDGs by 2030 and 2050. We model two pathways: a ‘Business-as-Usual Pathway’ which sees little divergence from the status-quo and a ‘Transform Australia Pathway’ which adopts ambitious actions to advance progress on the SDGs (see Methodology for more on the pathways).
The Transform Australia Pathway incorporates six key transformations with the greatest potential to achieve the SDGs:
- wellbeing and resilience
- a sustainable and just economy
- sustainable food systems
- energy decarbonisation
- sustainable urban development
- regenerating the environmental commons.
Across these six transformations, we implement a mix of 16 policy shifts in the modelling to accelerate progress towards the SDGs by 2030 and net zero by 2050.
Overall, the modelling results reveal that the Transform Australia Pathway greatly improves progress towards the SDGs by 2030 and achieves most goals by 2050 (~90% average progress towards all targets). Without these ambitious policy shifts, a 'Business as Usual' pathway sees Australia's progress on the SDGs stagnate and decline over the long-term, reaching only 55% progress on all targets.
Below you can learn more about the modelling approach and the different policy shifts, and access modelling projections and results from the analysis for each of the six transformations.
