The BEACON Project (Biodiversity, Energy justice And CONflict) +3

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promote global economic and social prosperity while simultaneously seeking to protect the environment. All UN member states are signatories to achieving SDGs under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, competing objectives of SDGs require decision-makers to make trade-offs among SDGs, leading to injustices, inequalities and environmental damage, ultimately preventing global sustainable development. To address this problem, the BEACON Project takes an inter- and transdisciplinary approach, using large hydropower development as a model system, combining biodiversity with the theory of energy justice to deliver the critical step change in research needed to quantify the trade-offs, conflicts and synergies between SDGs and between stakeholders with differing sustainable development priorities.

In its first phase, BEACON has generated evidence of spatial and temporal injustices in the distribution of costs/benefits of hydropower development, and in the recognition of people at different positions within decision-making and governance structures. Through combining biodiversity with energy justice theory, BEACON has brought biodiversity to the fore in terms of advancing multiple SDGs simultaneously, highlighting its critical role for meeting SDGs associated with climate action, livelihoods, food security and reducing inequalities.

Scientific advances and consensus now provide unequivocal evidence for the dual biodiversity and climate crises. New global policies and targets have emerged, e.g. protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030 (30×30) as the flagship action of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration began in 2021 and the UN has identified this decade as the "last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change". Thus, there is drive for a rapid, just energy transition, reaching net-zero by 2050. At the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference COP28, a global pledge to triple the global installed capacity of renewable energy sources was launched.

Through these new policies, new trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, inequalities, livelihoods and food security are rapidly emerging. For example, the GBF calls for policies that expand and more strictly enforce protected areas, ecosystem restoration projects for biodiversity conservation, and afforestation for carbon capture. Due to trade-offs between the needs of these new policies and existing land-use and tenure, policies may lead to unintentional consequences of land-use conflicts and forced displacement, leading to failings in SDGs linked to livelihoods, food security, inequality and justice. Moreover, global energy transition policies progress at pace, and large hydropower and other renewables are expanding globally. However, action on – and accountability for – fully considering and mitigating the multi-scalar impacts of largescale energy development is still lacking. This risks perpetuation and expansion of inequalities and injustices, as well as biodiversity loss in a time of global crisis.

BEACON+3 will strengthen the multi-scalar society-science-policy interface needed to build more equitable decision-making, reduce harms and inequalities created by trade-offs, and ensure biodiversity is core to developing solutions to global challenges. As new multi-scalar trade-offs and conflicts emerge and evolve in response to global policies, applying the concepts and knowledge generated in BEACON to new contexts is urgently needed. BEACON+3 will be at the forefront of inter- and transdisciplinary research, mobilising, co-generating and delivering the knowledge exchange needed to support multi-scalar decision-making in existing and emerging policy trade-off and conflict contexts. BEACON+3 will build the real-world transformative change and impact needed to support urgent, equitable progress on global goals.