Abstract
To achieve a climate-neutral economy, the deployment of low-carbon technologies is accelerating. Their impacts inherently involve trade-offs among the UN Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) due to the complexity of global value chains (GVC). To capture these effects, we develop a framework connecting future technology adoption to changes in GVC as represented in global multi-regional input–output data. This allows translating GVC data into more than 30 SDG indicators. We apply this framework to examine effects of offshore wind and solar PV adoption by changing the structure of electricity production. Results show that impacts vary significantly across technologies, highlighting the importance of identifying trade-offs individually. We further assess the sensitivity of the results to technological change and shifts in the trade structure of the renewable electricity industry. The findings indicate that for some SDG indicators, even small changes in input-coefficient assumptions, especially trade coefficients, can shift the impacts between positive and negative.