A new perspective on the SDGs nexus: ethnobiology’s contribution

Abstract Progress achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is insufficient at global scale. A thorough understanding of SDG synergies and trade-offs is needed to enhance their achievement, but such understanding is still limited. Ethnobiology has been proposed as a discipline able to contribute to sustainability and finely-tuned to study these interlinkages. In this study, we conducted a systematic review of all articles published by the Journal of Ethnobiology since 2015 (SDGs’ adoption year) and evaluated if and how they address one or more SDGs. We asked the following questions: 1) Do articles mention explicitly or implicitly the SDGs? 2) What connections does ethnobiology establish between them? 3) How do articles define sustainability? And, (4) whether articles dealing with sustainability are more inclusive to non-academics. Our study shows that ethnobiology implicitly addresses almost all SDGs and focuses particularly on the connectedness of SDGs 1–3 and 15. Biodiversity’s understanding (SDG 15) provides the basis for culture and Indigenous and local knowledge and ensures communities’ food security (SDG 2), health and well-being (SDG 3), and prosperity (SDG 1). We observe that ethnobiology studies sustainability in paradigm ethics of Indigenous peoples and local communities rather than that of the global sustainability agenda, but that local actors are still not commonly engaged in knowledge co-construction processes. While ethnobiology can provide an analysis of the SDGs complimentary to that of sustainability science and be a motor of transformative change, this potential is not fully realized because of a persisting decoupling between place-based research and global sustainability frameworks.