Abstract The predominant focus on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Municipal Development Plans (MDPs) has driven socio-economic progress but often fails to integrate planetary boundaries, compromising the Earth’s capacity to dissipate entropy from human activities. Exceeding planetary boundaries weakens natural systems, diminishing their ability to support life-sustaining functions and making long-term sustainability unfeasible. This study evaluates the development plans (2024–2027) of 11 municipalities in the Valle del Cauca region—Buenaventura, Candelaria, Cartago, Florida, Guadalajara de Buga, Jamundí, Palmira, Pradera, Santiago de Cali, Tuluá, and Yumbo—examining SDG integration and their potential contributions or conflicts with planetary boundaries. The goal is to establish a baseline of SDG integration in local planning, assess their environmental impact, and propose strategies to align socio-economic development with planetary limits. The study involved a collaborative analysis with ProPacífico, measuring SDG contributions (targets 1.2, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, 8.1, and 11.1) against planetary boundaries, including climate change, freshwater consumption, land-use change, and biogeochemical flows of N and P. Importantly, the environmental indicators applied here are based on national per-capita datasets extrapolated to the municipal scale, meaning the results should be understood as indicative pressures rather than precise local measurements. Despite this limitation, the extrapolations provide a consistent baseline to compare municipalities and to highlight areas of potential ecological risk. Despite progress in SDG implementation, persistent unsustainable consumption and production patterns contribute to planetary boundary degradation, increasing entropy and compromising regional sustainability. The main purpose of this article is to evaluate how Municipal Development Plans (MDPs) in eleven municipalities of Valle del Cauca integrate and operationalize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under the framework of the Grand Ambition, and to assess their effects on planetary boundaries. The analysis is structured in three parts: first, the methodological framework and analytical tools are described; second, the evaluation of MDPs is carried out regarding their SDG alignment and implications for ecological thresholds; and third, the findings are discussed in terms of risks and opportunities for sustainable territorial planning, leading to concrete recommendations. The central result is that pursuing SDGs through MDPs does not guarantee sustainability; indeed, when planetary boundaries are not explicitly included, the impacts are mostly negative. The decisive conclusion is that embedding ecological safeguards in MDPs is essential to ensure that progress toward the SDGs translates into genuine sustainability within safe planetary limits.
Rincón-Cárdenas et al. (Fri,) studied this question.