The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promote a broad set of socio-economic and environmental goals. Through a case study on Malaysia, this paper investigates how economic Goal 8 (economic growth), Goal 9 (industry), and Goal 17(increased partnerships) are likely to conflict with environmental Goal 13 (climate action), Goal 14 (life below water), and Goal 15 (life on land). We analyze data from Economy-Wide Material Flows Analysis (EW-MFA) that captures Malaysia’s aggregate resource use over time and also assess the likely economic and environmental contradictions for Malaysia’s future trajectory by looking at major drivers of Malaysia’s economic growth. Using policy-scoring, we provide a detailed analysis of how the various sectors of growth are likely to result in synergies or trade-offs with the environmental SDGs. We find substantial contradictions between the economic and environmental SDGs for Malaysia. Our paper questions whether or not, when examining a concrete case study, economic and environmental SDGs are compatible.

联合国可持续发展目标 (SDG) 促进了一系列广泛的社会经济和环境目标。通过对马来西亚的案例研究，本文调查了经济目标 8（经济增长）、目标 9（工业）和目标 17（增加伙伴关系）如何与环境目标 13（气候行动）、目标 14（生活在水）和目标 15（陆地生命）。我们分析了来自经济范围内物质流分析 (EW-MFA) 的数据，该分析捕捉了马来西亚随着时间的推移的总体资源使用情况，并通过研究马来西亚经济增长的主要驱动力来评估马来西亚未来轨迹可能出现的经济和环境矛盾。使用政策评分，我们详细分析了各个增长部门可能如何与环境可持续发展目标产生协同效应或权衡取舍。我们发现马来西亚的经济和环境可持续发展目标之间存在重大矛盾。我们的论文质疑，在审查具体案例研究时，经济和环境可持续发展目标是否兼容。