Beyond the SDGs: Scientists Call for Regenerative Development Goals After 2030

The world’s most ambitious experiment in global cooperation is running out of road. The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal blueprint for human prosperity and planetary health, are due to expire in 2030, and the verdict from the latest assessments is sobering. Seven of the nine planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity have already been crossed, while key social indicators show only slow improvement or, in some cases, outright deterioration. Against this backdrop, a team of sustainability researchers argues that simply extending or tweaking the existing framework would be a serious mistake. Writing in the journal PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, Steffen Farny of Leuphana University Lüneburg and his colleagues propose a fundamentally different architecture for the post-2030 era: a set of Regenerative Development Goals, or RDGs, designed not merely to slow the damage but to actively restore the living and social systems on which all human activity depends.

The case for a paradigm shift rests on a candid audit of what came before. From 2000 to 2015, the Millennium Development Goals channeled global attention toward poverty and hunger reduction, and by that measure they delivered: more than one billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty during that period. Yet the same fifteen years saw an unprecedented exploitation of natural resources, as economic growth became the dominant, and often the only, metric of success. The SDGs that followed were meant to correct this imbalance by integrating seventeen interlocking goals covering everything from clean energy to life below water. In practice, the researchers argue, the framework has been undermined by the very structure intended to make it comprehensive. Governments, companies and institutions have cherry-picked the goals that suit them, treating the 169 targets as a menu rather than an integrated system, and progress on some goals has been offset by rising global inequality and continued biophysical degradation elsewhere.

The financing picture is equally stark. According to United Nations estimates cited in the analysis, the annual funding gap for achieving the SDGs stands at between 2.5 and 4.0 trillion US dollars, and it is widening, particularly in developing countries. The authors contend that neither the MDGs nor the SDGs proved compatible with the scale and complexity of intertwined social-ecological challenges, and that neither framework succeeded in mobilizing investment at anything close to the required magnitude, despite economic growth being positioned as the primary engine of change. A handful of transnational corporations, meanwhile, dominate the key sectors that link human and natural systems, concentrating both the power to cause harm and, potentially, the power to repair it. The SDG era, the paper concludes, will leave the world falling far short of essential social and biophysical targets, with the machinery of goal-setting intact but the systems it was meant to steer still spiraling in the wrong direction.

What would a regenerative alternative look like? The intellectual foundation is regenerative systems thinking, a perspective that treats today’s headline crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss and global inequity, not as separate problems to be solved one at a time but as symptoms of degenerative dynamics running through deeply interconnected systems. A regenerative system, in this framing, is one with an innate capacity to self-renew, provided it is managed well. The authors identify three paradigmatic changes that would distinguish RDGs from their predecessors. The first is breadth of domain: regenerative goals should span every sector in need of renewal, from agriculture and chemistry to education, health and economics, because interest in regeneration is already rising across civil society, business, politics and academia alike.

The second change concerns what development itself means. RDGs would foster thriving rather than growth, a shift from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvement. An economy oriented toward thriving, the authors suggest, would be characterized by low inequality and a strong focus on quality of life rather than the sheer quantity of economic transactions. Development, drawing on Amartya Sen’s capabilities tradition, is reframed as the striving for a world in which individuals and communities are free to exercise agency in shaping how they function within a larger context. Crucially, the thriving of all beings is understood as interconnected: one party’s flourishing should support the capabilities of others without curtailing their freedom to thrive. This is a deliberate inversion of trade-off thinking, in which one group’s gains are routinely financed by another group’s or another ecosystem’s losses.

The third and, in the authors’ view, most significant change lies in the very definition of a goal. Regeneration is an ongoing process, a sequence of interventions that converts degenerative dynamics into regenerative ones. Goal-setting under an RDG framework would therefore focus first on dismantling the feedback loops that cause degeneration and on supporting the feedback loops that lead to regeneration, including the enabling conditions that allow thriving within and across targeted domains. Fixed, absolute quantities, the staple of SDG target language, would take a back seat to the health of underlying system dynamics. Only once regenerative dynamics are established across multiple domains, the authors argue, does it become meaningful to set outcome-oriented targets with specific time horizons. The immediate priority is the transition itself: from degenerative to regenerative, just and life-supporting dynamics.

Skeptics might dismiss this as abstract philosophy, but the paper grounds the concept in concrete, operational examples across sectors that are typically considered irredeemably degenerative. Industrial agriculture degrades soils and erodes biodiversity, yet regenerative agriculture is rapidly emerging as an alternative that produces healthy dynamics across multiple interrelated domains. The Commonland Foundation, working in degraded landscapes around the world, has demonstrated that a holistic focus on landscape dynamics can yield simultaneous social, economic and natural returns, a pattern the researchers describe as benefits cascading through previously degraded agricultural terrain. The lesson is that restoration is not charity for nature; it is an investment whose returns compound across domains.

Chemistry offers a second, perhaps surprising, proving ground. Conventional chemistry is often degenerative in its reliance on finite feedstocks and persistent waste, but regenerative chemistry aims to build continuously self-renewing systems: raw materials treated as renewable and finite resources, energy used appropriately, and product degradability assessed with circularity in mind. One illustrative pathway uses biorefinery approaches to extract valuable bioactive compounds from non-edible agro-industrial residues such as citrus peel. By complexing these compounds with essential metals, researchers can produce green bio-based pesticides that support symbiotic food production cycles, turning an agricultural waste stream into an input for regenerative farming. The technical logic is circular by design: the output of one degenerative process becomes the substrate for a regenerative one.

The social sphere follows the same logic. Businesses can set themselves on regenerative pathways through inclusive workplace design, offering decent work, fair pay and supportive social relations that help reintegrate stigmatized and marginalized people into society. In such workplaces, tasks are crafted around people’s actual capabilities rather than hiring employees to fill predefined functions, and classical efficiency metrics are replaced by cultures that thrive on workforce diversity. The authors point to Greyston Bakery in the United States, Heyho in Germany and La Fageda in Spain as working examples. At the scale of whole economies, regeneration means minimizing waste, maximizing resource reuse and investing deliberately in natural, social and knowledge capital, the stocks that can grow even as non-renewable resources inevitably degrade. Direct trade models for commodities like coffee and cocoa illustrate the mechanism: by replacing exploitative relations premised on power asymmetries between the Global North and Global South with transparent, trust-based relationships between producers and consumers, social capital is built across the entire supply chain, and all economic actors come to share responsibility for the natural resources on which the activity ultimately depends.

What the authors call for next is a roadmap. They see an urgent need to identify concrete cross-sectoral regenerative dynamics that can inform post-2030 sustainability policy at national, regional and local levels. The SDGs were ratified on the assumption that breaking complex challenges into seventeen goals and 169 targets would deliver prosperity for all; the post-2030 agenda may retain similar or additional domains, but the decisive test will be whether identified pathways can instigate regenerative dynamics that span multiple domains in an ever more hyper-connected social-ecological context. The researchers frame the stakes in deliberately expansive language: as the world confronts, understands and mitigates the global polycrisis, the inevitable interactions across domains and scales could become the cornerstone of a global poly-opportunity, in which the same interconnection that spreads crisis also spreads renewal. Whether negotiators drafting the next generation of global goals embrace that inversion may determine whether the second half of the century is spent repairing spirals of decline or riding upward ones that benefit both people and nature.

Subject of Research: A proposed framework of Regenerative Development Goals to replace the Sustainable Development Goals in the post-2030 global sustainability agenda

Article Title: Regenerative Development Goals should shape the post-2030 sustainability agenda

Article References: Farny, S., Fischer, J., Zeidler, V. G. Z., Abson, D. J., & McElroy, C. (2026). Regenerative Development Goals should shape the post-2030 sustainability agenda. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(9), e0000285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000285

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000285

Keywords: Regenerative Development Goals, Sustainable Development Goals, post-2030 agenda, planetary boundaries, regenerative agriculture, regenerative chemistry, inclusive workplaces, direct trade, polycrisis, systems thinking, global inequality, sustainability transformation